Lead QA Engineer

Job description

Come work at a place where innovation and teamwork come together to support the most exciting missions in the world! Qualys is looking for a Lead QA Engineer to own quality for a platform that ingests assets, findings, and risk signals from dozens of third-party security vendors ore — and normalizes them into a single risk model used by thousands of enterprise customers. You will lead a team of QA and automation engineers, define the test strategy across UI, backend, and data pipelines, and drive our move toward AI-assisted, self-healing automation. This is a hands-on leadership role: you set direction, make release-quality calls, and still write and review framework code. Candidates who have built or meaningfully enhanced AI-based self-healing automation tools will stand out. --- Responsibilities QA Leadership & Strategy - Lead, mentor, and grow a team of 4–8 QA and automation engineers; run hiring, goal-setting, code reviews, and career development. - Define and own the end-to-end test strategy for connector and platform releases — test planning, risk assessment, coverage targets, and entry/exit criteria. - Act as the quality voice in sprint planning, design reviews, and release readiness; make clear go/no-go recommendations backed by data. - Establish QA processes that scale: defect triage, severity/priority standards, regression tiers, test case management, and root-cause analysis for escaped defects. - Track and report quality metrics — defect leakage, automation coverage, flaky-test rate, mean time to detect, release cycle time — to engineering and product leadership. - Partner closely with development, product, support, and sustenance teams to shift quality left and reduce customer-reported issues. Test Automation (Hands-On) - Architect and evolve automation frameworks across React/TypeScript front ends, Java/Spring Boot microservices, REST/GraphQL APIs, and Kafka-based pipelines. - Build resilient UI automation with Playwright or Selenium 4, including parallel execution and reliable test data management. - Own API and contract testing (REST Assured, Pact, Postman/Newman) covering OAuth2, JWT, token, and Basic auth flows, pagination, throttling, and vendor error handling. - Validate data end-to-end: ingestion → normalization → PostgreSQL persistence → aggregation → UI, including schema and migration regression. - Build mock vendor APIs and record-replay harnesses so connector tests run without live third-party credentials. - Own CI/CD quality gates in Jenkins or GitHub Actions with fast PR-level feedback and tiered regression runs. AI-Driven & Self-Healing Automation - Lead the design and rollout of self-healing automation: automatic locator recovery, DOM-similarity scoring, element fingerprinting, and confidence-based fallback that keeps suites green through UI changes. - Apply LLMs across the QA lifecycle — generating test cases from requirements and API specs, converting manual tests to automated scripts, summarizing failures, and suggesting root causes from logs. - Build intelligent flaky-test detection, failure classification, and auto-quarantine to separate real regressions from environmental noise. - Introduce risk-based and change-impact test selection so CI runs the tests most relevant to each change. - Evaluate AI testing tools (Healenium, Applitools, mabl, Testim, or in-house builds) and decide build-vs-buy based on accuracy, cost, and maintainability. - Set guardrails for AI use in QA — validating AI-generated tests, measuring healing accuracy, and preventing false passes. Qualifications Experience - 5–8 years in QA / test engineering, with at least 2 years leading or mentoring a QA team. - Track record of building automation frameworks from scratch and owning release quality for a SaaS product. - Hands-on experience building, extending, or productionizing an **AI-based or self-healing automation** solution — and the ability to explain how you measured its impact. Skills **Automation & Testing** - Playwright and/or Selenium 4; TestNG or JUnit 5; Cypress, Jest, or Vitest - API automation: REST Assured, Postman/Newman, GraphQL testing, schema validation - Contract testing (Pact), service virtualization, and mocking (WireMock or similar) - Performance testing with JMeter, k6, or Gatling - Visual regression and accessibility testing **Programming & Backend** - Strong **Java** (17+) and **JavaScript/TypeScript**; Python is a plus - SQL and data validation on PostgreSQL or similar - Familiarity with microservices, Spring Boot, and Kafka or other event streaming systems **AI & Machine Learning in QA** - Self-healing locator strategies and ML-based element matching - LLM integration: prompt design, structured outputs, and embedding model calls into test tooling - AI-assisted test generation, failure clustering, and log/trace summarization - Familiarity with RAG or vector search over test artifacts is a plus - Working knowledge of AI testing platforms (Healenium, Applitools, mabl, Testim) **DevOps & Tooling** - CI/CD with Jenkins or GitHub Actions - Docker and Kubernetes fundamentals - Test management (Jira/Xray, TestRail, or Zephyr) - Observability tools (Grafana, Prometheus, ELK) for test and pipeline diagnostics **Leadership** - Test strategy and planning for complex, multi-component releases - People leadership: hiring, mentoring, performance feedback - Clear communication with engineering, product, and leadership stakeholders - Data-driven decision-making on quality and release readiness Preferred - Background in cybersecurity — vulnerability management, CSPM, EDR, SIEM, or identity. - Experience testing multi-tenant SaaS at large data volumes. - ISTQB Advanced / Test Manager certification. - Open-source contributions to testing or automation projects.