Quality Assurance Lead

Job description

About Pelcro Pelcro is a subscription and paywall infrastructure platform that powers newspapers and publishers. We help clients migrate from legacy circulation systems to a modern, reliable platform that handles everything from recurring billing and payment processing to USPS postal fulfillment and access control. We're a small, high-impact team that values initiative, ownership, and getting things right. The Role We need a senior, hands-on QA leader who will own quality across the entire platform. That means setting the standards, establishing key metrics, and holding yourself and the team accountable to all of it. You'll lead a team of 2 QA engineers and partner closely with engineering, product, and client-facing teams. If you've built a QA function before — or restructured one that was struggling — this is your kind of challenge. What You'll Own The entire QA function: vision, process, playbooks, metrics, and execution. Test strategy across the full SDLC — from requirements through deployment, not as a gatekeeper at the end. QA team leadership: mentoring and assessing performance of your team. Identifying gaps in error reporting, logging, and observability — and building a roadmap to steadily improve coverage and signal quality. Key QA metrics (defect escape rate, test coverage, regression pass rates, cycle time) — defining them, tracking them, and using them to drive continuous improvement. Test plans, test cases, and regression suites in TestRail. Automated testing strategy and implementation. Must-Haves Demonstrable experience leading a team of QA engineers. Experience with AI tools (Claude Code preferred). Great attention to detail. UI/UX sensibility — ability to spot inconsistencies, broken flows, and poor user experience beyond just "does it work." Experience with automated testing frameworks (e.g., Cypress, Playwright, or Selenium). Solid understanding of REST APIs and ability to test backend services independently (Postman, cURL, etc.). Experience testing payment/billing flows (Stripe strongly preferred). Comfortable working with MySQL to validate data integrity and investigate issues. Experience writing and maintaining test plans, test cases, and regression suites in TestRail. Strong written communication — bug reports that engineers can act on without back-and-forth. Ability to identify gaps in error reporting, logging, and observability, and build a roadmap to steadily improve coverage and signal quality across the platform. Ability to define, implement, and own key QA metrics (defect escape rate, test coverage, regression pass rates, cycle time, etc.) and use them to drive continuous improvement. Experience embedding QA into the full SDLC — not a gatekeeper at the end, but a partner from requirements through deployment. Very Nice to Have Client-facing experience — able to join calls, reproduce reported issues, and communicate clearly with non-technical stakeholders. Experience with OpenSearch, Bugsnag, and Sentry for log analysis and error triage. Experience with subscription/SaaS platforms or recurring billing logic. Familiarity with PHP and/or Node.js codebases (enough to read code and pinpoint where things break). Experience with CI/CD pipelines and integrating automated tests into deployment workflows (GitHub Actions, etc.). Familiarity with Asana for defect tracking and sprint workflows, integrated with TestRail for test management. Performance testing experience (load testing APIs, identifying bottlenecks). Experience running QA retrospectives and blameless post-mortems to turn production incidents into process improvements. Familiarity with SOC 2 or other compliance frameworks and how QA documentation supports audit readiness. Benefits Competitive salary based on experience Fully remote work environment Strong opportunities for growth, ownership, and career progression Opportunity to work on a high-growth SaaS product with real impact Collaborative team with strong ownership culture In person team activities and offsites Next Steps As a next step, please create a brief video (via Loom or an equivalent platform) introducing yourself and discussing your experience. You can also showcase your work. You can add the link to your application or email it to . You may also find this video by our CEO insightful: