QA Engineering Lead

Finnair; Vantaa; Hybrid; EUR 90,000 - 130,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Hybrid work model

Leisure travel benefit

Wellbeing and health benefits

Campus gyms & hobby clubs

Job summary

Finnair is seeking a QA Engineering Lead to own quality directions for the Digital Engineering platform. Based at our HQ near Helsinki Airport, the role collaborates with Principal Engineer and Engineering Managers to elevate testing, automation, and quality practices across multiple teams.

You will drive modernization of quality engineering, mentor engineers, and shape KPI-driven improvements while aligning with AI-assisted development trends.

Qualifications

• Around 7-8+ years in software quality assurance or quality engineering.
• Experience leading quality initiatives across multiple teams.
• Hands-on experience with modern test automation frameworks and tools.
• Solid understanding of CI/CD pipelines, DevOps practices and modern software architectures.
• Experience with performance, security or reliability testing.
• Comfort leading without formal authority and mentoring engineers.
• Strong collaboration with engineers and product teams.
• Genuine interest in AI-assisted development and quality.

Responsibilities

• Set the quality engineering strategy, standards and frameworks across Digital Engineering.
• Own shared quality tooling and practices across teams.
• Drive test automation across unit, integration, end-to-end, performance and security levels.
• Mentor engineers on testing strategy and testable-by-design systems.
• Track key quality metrics and drive improvements across delivery lifecycles.
• Champion shared ownership of quality and influence engineering discussions.

Skills

QA leadership

Test automation

CI/CD

DevOps

Performance testing

Security testing

Mentoring

Product mindset

English communication

Education

Bachelor's or Master's degree

Tools

Selenium

Playwright

CI/CD tools

Observability tools

Job description

Finnair is a diverse community of professionals who work ambitiously with a big heart and commitment. A strong safety culture is our priority and at the core of our everyday work, never taking it for granted. We are committed to doing our share in solving the climate challenge by determinedly following our science-based pathway to decarbonise our operations. We find meaning in our purpose: With our heart in Finland, we make every journey better, today and tomorrow.Our values – Always Safe, Customer at Heart and Stronger Together– guide us in everything we do.

As part of the evolution of our Digital organisation, we are strengthening strategy implementation by clarifying structures and leadership to bring more focus, improve prioritisation, and support the business more closely. The new setup strengthens product management and software development practices and provides a clearer foundation for data‑and AI‑driven development, while enabling clearer roles and new opportunities for professional growth.

Our Digital Engineering team builds and runs Finnair's digital customer experience — one of Finland's largest e‑commerce platforms. We're investing in how we build it: strengthening our product and software development practices and building toward more modern, AI‑assisted engineering. Finnair Plus is central to how we build lasting relationships with our customers, and getting its technology right matters.

We are looking for

A QA Engineering Lead to own the technical direction for quality engineering across Digital Engineering. The role sits within the Engineering Platform team at Finnair HQ near Helsinki Airport, and works closely with the Principal Engineer who leads it.

The Engineering Platform team enables scalable, efficient and high‑quality software development across all of our engineering teams. As QA Engineering Lead, you own how Finnair builds quality in — driving the shift from traditional testing toward modern quality engineering, built on automation, continuous testing and AI‑assisted QA.

This is a senior individual‑contributor role focused on technical leadership. Over time, and depending on how the role and the person develop, it may also grow to include people‑leadership responsibilities. The teams keep a high degree of autonomy over how they build and test, while you set the broader quality direction, own the shared practices and tooling, and keep quality engineering strong and coherent across the organization. You'll work in close partnership with the Principal Engineer, Engineering Managers and product teams. Part of what makes the role interesting is shaping how Finnair approaches quality going forward, including where AI‑assisted testing genuinely helps.

In this role, you’ll

• Set the quality engineering strategy, standards and frameworks used across Digital Engineering, and shape how teams approach testing, reliability and testability.
• Own the shared quality tooling and practices, and keep a pragmatic, ongoing dialogue about which technologies and approaches fit our needs.
• Drive test automation at every level — unit, integration, end-to-end, performance and security — and make sure quality is embedded into our CI/CD pipelines and DevOps ways of working.
• Help complex quality challenges succeed across teams: mentoring engineers on testing strategy and testable‑by‑design systems, and unblocking the hard decisions that span more than one team.
• Track the metrics that matter (defect rates, coverage, production incidents, lead time for fixes) and use them to make quality measurably better.
• Champion a culture of shared ownership of quality, and contribute to technical discussions across the wider engineering organization.
• Explore how AI can change the way teams design, build, test and operate software, and guide its adoption.

What Success Could Look Like

• In your first months: you've got to know our systems, teams and the biggest quality challenges, formed a clear long‑term vision and the first few steps towards it.
• Within the first year: a modern quality strategy is taking hold, automation is expanding across the delivery lifecycle, and teams are increasingly owning quality rather than handing it off.
• Over time: quality is visibly stronger across Digital Engineering — fewer production incidents, faster and safer delivery, and a quality culture that holds without you having to push it.

To succeed and enjoy this role, we hope you bring

• Around 7-8+ years in software quality assurance or quality engineering, including experience leading quality initiatives across multiple teams.
• Strong, hands‑on experience with modern test automation frameworks and tools, and a good grasp of building solutions that are testable by design.
• A solid understanding of CI/CD pipelines, DevOps practices and modern software architectures.
• Experience with performance, security or reliability testing.
• Comfort leading without formal authority: you bring people along through clarity and credibility, and you're happy to challenge an approach when something doesn't add up.
• Strong coaching and mentoring instincts — you raise the bar for the engineers and teams around you.
• A product mindset — you care how quality affects our customers and the business, not just the code.
• Strong collaboration and proactivity, and the ability to bridge technical and non‑technical stakeholders on quality topics.
• Genuine interest in modern, AI‑assisted development
• Strong written and spoken English
• Bachelor's or Master's degree in a relevant field (or equivalent experience).

Nice to have

• Experience in e‑commerce or other transaction‑heavy, consumer‑facing products.
• Strong observability practices in production (structured logging, metrics, error/crash analytics, performance monitoring — e.g. Datadog).
• Experience in an airline or another regulated, high‑security domain.

Working at Finnair

We offer the chance to work in the fast‑changing aviation industry, in a culture that supports professional development and continuous improvement, with modern leadership practices and internally highly rated supervisory work. You'll also enjoy a leisure travel benefit to help you and your family explore the world, along with wellbeing support through our Sickness Fund insurance, Epassi benefits, campus gyms and hobby clubs.

We work in a hybrid model with regular on‑site presence at our HQ near Helsinki Airport.

Recruitment process

Our recruitment process is designed to give you the opportunity to get to know both the role and the people you'll be working with, while allowing us to understand your technical expertise, way of thinking and how you collaborate across teams.

The Process Includes

• Recruiter intro – an introductory discussion about your background, the role and what you're looking for.
• Hiring Manager interview – a deeper conversation about the team, the role, your experience and how you approach technical leadership.
• Lightweight pre‑assignment & technical discussion – a practical assignment followed by a discussion focused on your technical thinking, architectural decisions and problem‑solving approach.
• Final interview – a final conversation to answer any remaining questions, get to know each other better, and make sure the role is the right fit for both you and Finnair.

Our people are key to our success and the foundation that makes Finnair unique. We are committed to creating a safe work environment where all our people can thrive and succeed. We cherish diversity and strive to employ people with different backgrounds and experiences, bringing together multiple views to foster our business success. According to our employee survey, respecting diversity is at a high level in our work community.