This position is listed on behalf of a partner company, which manages all applications and next steps. Our partner is looking for a Staff Quality Engineer based in India.
The Staff Quality Engineer will serve as a strategic technical leader responsible for driving quality engineering excellence across a core product area within a distributed software engineering organization. This role goes beyond traditional software testing, combining hands-on technical expertise with strategic planning, cross-functional leadership, and quality governance. You will define and influence testing strategies, strengthen automation practices, and ensure quality initiatives are aligned with broader engineering and business objectives. Working closely with engineering leaders, product managers, developers, and quality teams, you will promote shared accountability for software quality throughout the development lifecycle. You will also champion innovative AI-powered testing solutions, improve performance and scalability validation, and proactively mitigate technical risks. This is an opportunity to shape engineering standards, mentor technical talent, and drive continuous improvement in a fast-paced, remote-first SaaS environment.
- Quality Strategy & Technical Leadership: Act as the primary quality engineering authority for an assigned product pillar, establishing testing standards, processes, and technical direction while ensuring consistency across product modules.
- Early SDLC Engagement: Participate in requirements refinement, sprint planning, RFCs, and design reviews to identify testability concerns, integration risks, and potential quality issues before development begins.
- Business & Engineering Alignment: Collaborate with Engineering Directors and Product Managers to align quality initiatives with product objectives, engineering priorities, and key performance indicators (OKRs), including delivery velocity and system reliability.
- Quality Ownership & Risk Management: Take end-to-end responsibility for quality across the assigned product area by identifying automation gaps, resource constraints, technical weaknesses, and release risks. Escalate critical issues and coordinate appropriate corrective actions.
- Cross-Functional Collaboration: Represent the product pillar in cross-module leadership discussions, coordinate dependencies between engineering teams, and promote standardized testing strategies, tools, and best practices.
- Performance & Non-Functional Testing: Design and lead performance, load, and scalability testing strategies to ensure applications and distributed systems can handle enterprise-level workloads, concurrency, and data volumes.
- AI-Driven Testing Innovation: Promote the adoption of AI throughout the testing lifecycle, collaborating with internal tooling teams to implement and standardize AI-powered solutions for test generation, intelligent failure analysis, and pipeline optimization.
- Test Automation & Engineering Excellence: Develop and maintain complex end-to-end (E2E) automation scripts, contribute test code, and review developer-written unit and integration tests to identify coverage gaps.
- Testing Frameworks & Coverage: Establish best practices for unit, functional, and acceptance testing frameworks. Develop strategies to improve test coverage and integrate quality requirements into release gates.
- Automation Reliability: Work closely with automation enablement specialists to address framework limitations, eliminate flaky tests, and improve the reliability and efficiency of automated testing pipelines.
- Resource Allocation & Prioritization: Strategically allocate quality engineering resources, prioritize critical user journeys, and coordinate team efforts around high-impact product initiatives.
- Mentorship & Knowledge Sharing: Coach and mentor Feature Quality Engineers and developers on advanced testing principles, automation practices, and quality engineering methodologies while encouraging technical ownership across teams.
- Continuous Improvement: Drive improvements in testing processes, engineering collaboration, and quality standards while promoting a culture in which software quality is a shared responsibility rather than solely a QA function.
Requirements
- 8–12+ years of professional experience in Quality Engineering, Software Development in Test (SDET), or a related technical discipline.
- Proven experience leading quality engineering initiatives across multiple teams, product modules, or complex software environments.
- Deep technical expertise in programming languages, testing tools, and automation frameworks, particularly Python, Pytest, Playwright, and TypeScript.
- Strong experience designing and implementing comprehensive automated testing strategies across unit, functional, integration, acceptance, and end-to-end testing.
- Demonstrated expertise in performance, load, and scalability testing for complex distributed systems.
- Experience evaluating build-versus-buy decisions and designing or implementing custom solutions based on industry-leading testing practices.
- Strong understanding of software development lifecycles, test architecture, quality engineering methodologies, and release management.
- Ability to assess technical and release risks, balance delivery timelines with quality requirements, and optimize testing execution without compromising engineering velocity.
- Practical experience with Generative AI, Large Language Models (LLMs), or AI-powered solutions within software testing is a strong advantage.
- Experience contributing to AI-driven testing frameworks, internal engineering tools, or intelligent automation solutions is preferred.
- Familiarity with API and web application UI automation tools such as Gherkin, Cypress, or equivalent technologies.
- Experience deploying, installing, and configuring applications on cloud-based infrastructure; AWS experience is an advantage.
- Strong technical problem-solving abilities, with the capacity to identify complex quality challenges and develop scalable solutions.
- Excellent communication, influencing, and stakeholder management skills, including the ability to represent engineering initiatives and align cross-functional teams.
- High emotional intelligence, maturity, and active listening skills, with an openness to feedback and different perspectives.
- Demonstrated ownership, humility, and accountability, including the ability to recognize risks, request support when necessary, and share credit for collective achievements.
- Strong mentoring and leadership capabilities, with a collaborative approach to empowering engineers and improving team performance.
- Ability to thrive in fast-paced, evolving, and remote-first technology environments.
- Fluency in written and spoken English.
- Willingness and ability to participate in scheduled on-call rotations and respond to production alerts when required.
Benefits
- Fully remote working arrangement within India.
- Full-time employment opportunity in a global, remote-first technology organization.
- Opportunity to collaborate with talented engineering professionals across multiple countries and disciplines.
- Exposure to innovative AI-powered technologies, advanced automation frameworks, and large-scale SaaS platforms.
- Opportunity to influence engineering strategy, establish quality standards, and drive organization-wide improvements.
- Strong emphasis on professional development, technical expertise, and continuous learning.
- Collaborative and inclusive workplace culture that values diverse perspectives, innovation, and individual contributions.
- Opportunity to work closely with experienced engineering leaders and product teams.
- Autonomy and ownership in shaping technical initiatives and introducing new approaches to quality engineering.
- Opportunity to contribute to products and infrastructure supporting a global customer base.
