Senior QA Engineer

Lefty; Singapore; Hybrid; SGD 90,000 - 130,000; Full time

Job summary

Lefty is scaling quickly and hiring its first dedicated QA engineer, a founding role in the Tech team. You’ll design the QA function from scratch and drive quality across the product.

You’ll own test strategy, functional testing, UAT, and the release checklist, while building automated coverage for high-value flows and mentoring others on testability.

Qualifications

• 5+ years in QA, including experience building a QA function from scratch.
• Strong manual/exploratory testing and bug reporting discipline.
• Hands-on with an E2E framework (Playwright, Cypress).
• API testing experience; comfortable with gRPC tooling or able to ramp quickly.
• Comfortable reading frontend (Angular) and backend (Java) code to reason about root cause.
• Experience wiring automated tests into CI/CD (GitLab CI) so they gate releases.
• Zero-to-one builder: comfortable with no existing clear process.
• Pragmatic prioritizer: picks highest-risk flows to test first.
• Direct communicator: raises quality risks clearly and early, with evidence.
• Fluent English, spoken and written: Lefty’s Product & Tech team is highly international; English is the working language across teams.
• Interest in using AI/LLMs to scale test generation and coverage.
• Experience testing SaaS products with third-party API integrations.
• Performance/load testing exposure.

Responsibilities

• Define the test strategy first: set testing guidelines and automated-testing roadmap.
• Own functional testing & UAT: define test plans, run critical cycles, coordinate UAT.
• Own the release checklist: define pre-deploy and post-deploy checks.
• Build automated test coverage: stand up E2E/integration suites and API tests.
• Mentor on testability: help engineers write more testable code and grow unit tests.
• Partner across squads: align testing priorities across product teams.

Skills

Test strategy

Manual testing

Exploratory testing

Playwright

Cypress

API testing

CI/CD

Bug reporting

Communication

gRPC testing

Tools

Playwright

Cypress

GitLab CI

gRPC tooling

Job description

Context & Mission

Lefty is scaling fast, and we’re investing in engineering quality to match. We’re hiring our first dedicated QA engineer, a founding role in the Tech team.

As AI makes writing code faster and cheaper, quality control becomes the real bottleneck and differentiator — QA is more critical to product success than ever, not less.

Your mission: build the QA function from the ground up, in sequence:

• Month one is strategy: define testing guidelines for the team and design the automated-testing plan.

• Months two to six: stand up E2E coverage on the highest-risk user flows and put the release checklist in place.

• After that: extend coverage to API-level tests and hand routine functional testing back to the engineers, so your time goes to automation and risk.

You’ll work across multiple engineering squads, not just one team, to embed quality practices product-wide.

About the position

• Define the test strategy first: In your first month, set testing guidelines for engineers and design the automated-testing roadmap, what to automate, what stays manual, and in what order.

• Own functional testing & UAT: Define the functional test plan for each new feature, run the critical cycles yourself and delegate the rest to the engineers who built the feature. Coordinate User Acceptance Testing with stakeholders before major releases.

• Own the release checklist: Define the pre-deploy checklist and the post-deploy smoke test, and run them before every production deploy. You flag risks to the engineering lead, who makes the final ship decision. Your recommendation is documented on every release.

• Build automated test coverage: Stand up E2E/integration suites starting with the highest-value flows, and wire gRPC/API-level tests for backend services.

• Mentor on testability: Help engineers write more testable code and grow unit test coverage.

• Partner across squads: Work with multiple dev squads across the product, not a single fixed team, adapting testing priorities to each squad’s roadmap.

Our stack

• Backend: Java (Hibernate → MariaDB), 50+ gRPC services, Elasticsearch for search/analytics

• Frontend: Angular, communicating over gRPC-Web (via Envoy), Storybook, Playwright, Vitest

• Build & CI: Bazel monorepo, NX monorepo, GitLab CI

• 5+ years in QA, including experience building a QA function from scratch.

• Strong manual/exploratory testing and bug reporting discipline.

• Hands-on with an E2E framework (Playwright, Cypress).

• API testing experience; comfortable with gRPC tooling or able to ramp quickly.

• Comfortable reading frontend (Angular) and backend (Java) code to reason about root cause.

• Experience wiring automated tests into CI/CD (GitLab CI) so they gate releases.

• Zero-to-one builder: comfortable with no existing clear process.

• Pragmatic prioritizer: picks highest-risk flows to test first.

• Direct communicator: raises quality risks clearly and early, with evidence.

• Fluent English, spoken and written: Lefty’s Product & Tech team is highly international; English is the working language across teams.

• Interest in using AI/LLMs to scale test generation and coverage.

• Experience testing SaaS products with third-party API integrations.

• Performance/load testing exposure.