QA Engineering Lead: Hands-On Testing & Team Leadership

Future Secure AI; Austin (TX); On-site; USD 140,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

Future Secure AI in Austin seeks a Quality Assurance Engineering Lead to build and lead our QA team while staying hands-on with testing. This player-coach role is roughly 70% people leadership and 30% individual contributor work, with the balance shifting toward leadership as the team scales.

The ideal candidate will hire, develop, and manage QA engineers, design test plans, own QA strategy, and drive automation adoption across CI/CD pipelines.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, or related field.
• 6+ years of software QA experience with 2+ years directly managing a QA team.
• Comfortable balancing management with hands-on testing.
• Strong proficiency in manual and automated testing using Selenium, JUnit, TestNG.
• Experience with CI/CD tooling (Jenkins, GitLab CI) and integrating QA into deployment pipelines.
• Solid understanding of Agile/Scrum methodologies.
• Strong people leadership and communication skills.
• Ability to prioritize and manage both strategic and hands-on work in a fast-paced environment.

Responsibilities

• Build and grow the QA team, including hiring, onboarding, and setting performance expectations.
• Manage day-to-day team operations: workload distribution, 1:1s, performance reviews, and career development.
• Personally execute hands-on testing (functional, regression, performance, security) on priority features or releases.
• Own QA strategy and roadmap, aligning testing priorities with product and engineering goals.
• Design and maintain test plans, working with development teams to cover requirements.
• Drive adoption of automation frameworks and tooling to improve testing efficiency.
• Own QA integration into CI/CD pipelines with DevOps for optimized test execution.
• Track and report quality metrics to leadership.
• Lead root-cause analysis on significant quality escapes and drive improvements.
• Represent QA in cross-functional planning and architecture reviews.

Skills

QA leadership

Manual testing

Automated testing

Selenium

JUnit

TestNG

CI/CD

Jenkins

Agile/Scrum

People management

Test strategy

Education

Bachelor's degree in CS/IS

Tools

Selenium

JUnit

TestNG

Jenkins

GitLab CI

Job description

Future Secure AI in Austin seeks a Quality Assurance Engineering Lead to build and lead our QA team while staying hands-on with testing. This player-coach role is roughly 70% people leadership and 30% individual contributor work, with the balance shifting toward leadership as the team scales.

The ideal candidate will hire, develop, and manage QA engineers, design test plans, own QA strategy, and drive automation adoption across CI/CD pipelines.