Team Lead - QA

Leader IT Private Limited; Thiruvananthapuram; On-site; INR 3,000,000 - 4,500,000; Full time

Job summary

Leader IT Private Limited is seeking a QA Team Lead to own quality across the product delivery lifecycle. This hands-on leadership role manages a team of QA Engineers, driving a disciplined testing process and acting as the quality checkpoint between Engineering, DevOps, and Product.

The role requires 10+ years in QA with at least 2 years in leadership, a strong process discipline, and the ability to communicate with stakeholders on release readiness and defect trends.

Qualifications

• 10+ years in Quality Assurance, including 2+ years leading a QA team.
• Proven ability to own a structured QA process and defect lifecycle.
• Experience with CI/CD, release planning, and cross-functional collaboration.

Responsibilities

• Lead, coach, and grow a team of QA Engineers and manage workload and performance.
• Own hiring and onboarding for the QA team and train on testing tools.
• Run retrospectives and drive process improvements across sprints.
• Represent QA in sprint planning, reviews, and release meetings.
• Ensure end-to-end test planning, coverage, and release readiness.
• Coordinate with DevOps and Product for post-release support and QA validation.
• Oversee AI-assisted development QA checks and prevent data/credentials leakage.

Skills

Leadership

Stakeholder management

QA lifecycle

JIRA

CI/CD

Defect management

Release readiness

AI QA review

Tools

JIRA

Security scanners

Job description

We Align Strategy, Technology & People to Drive Real, Measurable Outcomes

We're looking for a QA Team Lead to own quality across our product delivery lifecycle — from test planning through to release sign-off. This is a hands-on leadership role: you'll manage a team of QA Engineers, build and run a disciplined testing process, and act as the key quality checkpoint between Engineering, DevOps, and Product. You'll be equally comfortable coaching your team through a tricky defect triage and standing in front of stakeholders to explain why a release isn't ready yet.

We're a process-driven organisation with clearly defined quality gates, defect SLAs, and release readiness standards. You don't need to build this from scratch — but you do need to be excellent at running it, improving it, and holding the line when it matters.

What You'll Do

• Lead, coach, and grow a team of QA Engineers — including workload planning, performance management, and skill development.
• Own hiring and onboarding for the QA team, including training new hires on our testing tools and quality standards.
• Run regular team retrospectives and turn recurring issues into concrete process improvements.
• Represent QA in sprint planning, backlog grooming, design reviews, and release meetings.
• Flag resourcing, tooling, or skills gaps to your manager early, backed by data (defect trends, coverage gaps, missed SLAs).
• Set the team's day-to-day rhythm: sprint-level test planning, defect triage, and monthly quality reporting.

Quality Process Ownership

• Own the end-to-end test planning process: requirements review, test strategy, test case design, test data preparation, execution, defect logging, retest, and sign-off.
• Make sure QA is involved from the start of each sprint — test coverage should be planned before development begins, not bolted on afterward.
• Keep core QA deliverables current every sprint: test plans, test cases mapped to acceptance criteria, test data, the regression suite, the defect log, and a release readiness summary.
• Run the required test types every sprint — functional and regression testing as standard, smoke testing after every deployment, integration testing for API changes, and performance/security testing for major releases.
• Jointly own the Definition of Done with the development team — a story doesn't move forward until both development and QA have signed off.
• Own the handover checklist into user acceptance testing, confirming the technical side is ready before business stakeholders get involved.
• Maintain a clean, well-documented defect lifecycle — clear titles, severity ratings, reproduction steps, expected vs. actual behaviour, and environment details on every ticket.
• Enforce defect response times based on severity, escalating critical issues immediately and routine ones on a predictable cadence.
• Make sure nothing gets closed without being properly retested, and that visual or design-related issues get sign-off from the design team before being dismissed.

AI-Assisted Development Quality Checks

• Own the extra QA steps required whenever AI tools have been used in development — reviewing security scan results, checking that AI-referenced code libraries and functions are real and behave as expected, running full regression on any AI-touched code, and confirming any resulting technical debt gets logged.
• Apply the team's internal quality marker to any AI-assisted work once QA has signed off — this is what confirms the work is ready to move forward.
• Make sure the team never enters proprietary code, client data, or credentials into any AI tool.

Release & Cross-Functional Coordination

• Sign off on release readiness, confirming all planned work has cleared testing and no serious defects remain open.
• Provide QA's security validation as part of the pre-release security review.
• Confirm regression results and coverage targets are met before a release is cleared for the next stage.
• Work closely with DevOps on any post-release issues, including confirming environment stability and supporting rollback decisions if something goes wrong.
• Act as QA's point of contact for the design team on visual or UX-related defects, and respond quickly when a design question needs QA input.
• Coordinate with Business Analysts on preparing acceptance testing scenarios.
• Report on team and quality metrics to your manager on a regular cadence.

What We're Looking For

Leadership & People Skills

• Proven experience managing and developing a QA team (8+ people), including performance conversations.
• Confident stakeholder management — you're comfortable representing QA to Product, Engineering, DevOps, and senior leadership.
• A track record of running structured retrospectives and turning quality data into real process improvements.

Process Discipline

• Experience building or running a structured, repeatable QA process — not ad hoc testing.
• Comfortable working with issue-tracking tools (e.g. JIRA), defect classification systems, and clear documentation standards.
• Used to working within multi-step approval processes and holding a firm line on quality standards, even under release pressure.

Technical Knowledge

• Solid grounding in the full testing lifecycle: functional, regression, smoke, integration, performance, and security testing.
• Familiarity with security scanning tools and vulnerability/dependency checks, and how to read their output.
• Working knowledge of CI/CD pipelines and environment structures (dev, QA, staging, UAT, production) and how QA fits into each stage.
• Comfortable with the idea of validating AI-assisted code — checking for issues like fabricated dependencies or silent regressions. No prior experience required; we'll provide training.

Experience

• 10+ years in Quality Assurance, including at least 2 years leading a QA team.
• Experience working in a structured, process-driven environment is a strong plus.

What Success Looks Like

In this role, you'll be measured on outcomes like:

Measure Target

Defects caught before they reach client testing Fewer than 1 in 20 slip through

Defects caught before they reach production Fewer than 1 in 50 slip through