Founding QA Lead (Remote - India)

Uplers Solutions Private Limited.; India; Remote; INR 1,800,000 - 3,200,000; Full time

Job summary

NV is scaling two fast-growing products and seeks a Founding QA Lead to establish the QA function, define quality standards, and build the testing processes. The role blends manual judgment with extensive release automation, CI/CD integration, and production observability to ensure reliable releases for enterprise and developer platforms.

Initially a team of one, you will hire and mentor the QA team, own release readiness, and drive a culture of quality across rapid product cycles and

Qualifications

• Experience building QA practices from scratch or leading a new QA function.
• Strong automation mindset with release automation and CI/CD integration.
• Ability to define quality standards for enterprise and developer platforms.

Responsibilities

• Own QA strategy across two products and define ready-to-ship criteria.
• Lead performance, load and concurrency testing before releases.
• Build automation and integrate tests into CI/CD pipelines.
• Set up production observability with dashboards and alerts.
• Ensure regulatory/compliance checks for BFSI-like clients.
• Verify data flows from transcripts to client systems.

Skills

AI

Conversation AI

Cypress

Financial Services

Fintech

Gen AI

LLM

Playwright

Automation Testing

Manual Testing

Performance Testing

Functional Testing

Load Testing

Stress Testing

API Testing

Web Testing

Mobile Testing

Java

Python

Golang

JavaScript

TypeScript

Job description

Experience: 3.00 + years

Salary: Confidential (based on experience)

Expected Notice Period: 15 Days

Shift: (GMT+05:30) Asia/Kolkata (IST)

Opportunity Type: Remote

Placement Type: Full Time Permanent position(Payroll and Compliance to be managed by: An enterprise-focused Voice AI company)

*Note: This is a requirement for one of Uplers' client - An enterprise-focused Voice AI company

Must have skills required:

AI, Conversation AI, Cypress, Financial Services, fintech domain, Gen AI, LLM, Playwright, Automation Testing, Manual Testing, Performance Testing, Functional Testing, Load Testing, stress testing, API test, web testing, Mobile testing, Java, Python, Golang, JavaScript, Type Script

Founding QA Lead

Who We Are

At NV, we'e building the leading voice AI infrastructure company for India. We own the full stack: speech recognition (STT), speech synthesis (TTS), a small language model, and the orchestration layer that holds them together. Our models are built in India from the ground up and run live inside banks, insurers, and lenders, on-prem and in the cloud.

Since 2018, we've trained on real conversations across 12+ languages and 45+ dialects, because the person on the other end of the line is calling from a small town, switching languages mid-sentence, about their money. When something breaks, there's no vendor to point at. It's ours.

The problem you're here to solve

NV is scaling two fast-growing products: an enterprise AI contact center for highly regulated industries (banks, insurers) and a developer API platform that requires rapid feedback loops.

Core Challenge

Product growth is outpacing the current ability to test reliability, necessating a dedicated QA function to identify limits before issues reach production.

This isn't a manual QA role.

You will build the QA function from scratch, define quality standards for both products, write the foundational testing processes, and build the QA team. The role requires a hybrid approach, combining targeted manual testing where judgment is needed with comprehensive release automation and production observability.

What Will Be True Because You're Here

In your first few months:

• Nothing reaches a customer untested. Both products have a release bar, and it's different for an enterprise rollout and a developer-facing update.
• Load and scale testing runs before every major release, so we ship knowing exactly how much concurrency and latency headroom we have.
• The flows that matter most have automated regression coverage that runs on every release, and manual testing goes where judgment beats scripts.
• On the API platform, monitoring tells us something broke before a developer does, and external feedback becomes triaged, fixed issues on a loop the team can see.

In your first year:

• We have a test strategy for what clients actually depend on: platform performance and stability under real load, compliance on every release, and the outcomes they bought us for. It covers latency and concurrency at scale, uptime across cloud and on-device deployments, and the regulatory checks our BFSI clients answer to. Agent behaviour is part of it, but a smaller part as long as it aids you to deep dive into platform / feature testing.
• You've decided how big QA should be at NV, made the first hire or hires, and set the bar they're held to.

What You'll Do

• Test strategy. Own QA across both products: what gets tested, how, and what "ready to ship" means for each.
• Performance and scale. Run load, stress and concurrency tests before major releases, and know where the platform breaks before a client campaign finds out.
• Automation. Build test automation and wire it into CI/CD so regression runs on every release.
• Observability. Set up monitoring, dashboards and alerts on how both products perform in production, and act on what they show.
• Compliance and outcomes. Check that every release meets the regulatory requirements our BFSI clients answer to, and that the outcomes they track, like connect rates and dispositions, stay accurate.
• Data and pipelines. Verify that post-call data, from transcripts to extracted fields, reaches client systems complete and correct.
• Release ownership. Run defect triage, set quality gates and make the final call on release readiness. Then hire and mentor the team that does this with you.

The honest part

You start as a team of one, with no test plan and no solid framework. You decide, and when something slips, it's yours.

You'll handle two release speeds. The AI contact center ships on sprint cycles and client timelines. The API platform ships much faster.

Scale is the hard part. Contact center load comes in regular product cycles and/or when campaigns go live, on-prem deployments that don't behave like our cloud, and the API platform has to stay up for developers.

You'll also have to change habits. A team that has shipped without dedicated QA function will push back on anything that feels like it slows them down. Part of the job is making quality the faster path, not the obstacle.

We hire for the same five traits on every team. Here''''s what they look like in this role

• Self-driven and ambitious. You've built a QA practice, or a meaningful piece of one, where none existed. You can name what changed because of it.
• Critical of your own work. You can walk us through a bug that got past you, why it did, and what you changed afterwards.
• Ownership of outcomes. "Tested" isn't the end of your story. You followed a release into production and know whether it held.
• Care about who you build for. You think about the bank whose campaign can't go down mid-morning, and the developer whose integration broke at 2am. You test for them, not for the spec.
• Long-term over quick wins. You've argued to hold a release, with a reason and an alternative, and you can tell us what happened next.

The bar for this role

Craft.

You're strong at both manual and automated testing, and you know when each is the right call. You've built automation frameworks yourself, not only run someone else's. You've load-tested a real system with k6, Locust, JMeter or similar, and you can tell us what broke first and why. You're comfortable wiring tests into CI and testing APIs directly. You've set up monitoring and alerting on a live product, so you know what to watch and what to ignore.

Quality.

We ship into regulated environments where a failed release affects a real person's money. You treat quality as a habit the whole team practises, not a gate at the end.

Constant innovation.

You're always looking for better ways to test at scale, including using AI to do it. You expect last year's QA playbook to need rewriting here, and that excites you.

What You Don't Need

You don't need prior experience in voice, AI or BFSI. Several of our best people had none. You don't need a big-company QA title either. Having built quality from scratch once, and knowing what you'd do differently, tells us more than a decade of maintaining someone else's process.

How We Hire

We start with a discovery call, where we also discuss compensation so nobody is surprised later. Then come a craft conversation with two people you'd work with and a values conversation with someone outside the team.

The practical exercise is short: we give you one of our products and ask how you'd test it. It's scoped to a few days and is never work we'd ship. The whole process takes four to six weeks.

What we owe you: feedback if we don't move forward after interviews, straight answers on the business and the equity, and word on any delay instead of silence.

Why NV

• Remote flexibility
• Recently raised Series A funding with rapidly scaling team and innovation
• Culture of transparency and ownership
• Contribute to building cutting-edge voice technology for India