QA Lead

Remote; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 150,000 - 190,000; Full time

Job summary

Baselane is hiring a hands-on QA Lead to own quality end-to-end in our AI-first engineering environment. You’ll write Playwright tests, lead manual testers turning into automation, and mentor engineers to improve test coverage for our banking and fintech platform.

You’ll split time between coding and team-building: building automation, refining the QA strategy, and collaborating with Engineering, Product, Design, and DevOps to ensure reliable releases with secure money-movement flows.

Qualifications

• 7+ years in software quality, including 2+ years leading QA teams while remaining hands-on.
• Experience testing web applications and APIs (GraphQL for main product, REST for partner endpoints), including test data management and environment setup.
• Proven track record coaching manual testers into automation and integrating tests into CI/CD workflows.
• Hands-on experience using AI coding agents to write and maintain tests, with the judgment to validate their output.
• Strong communication skills and the ability to influence quality practices across engineering and product.
• Experience testing AI/LLM-powered features: building eval sets and running evals in CI to catch regressions.

Responsibilities

• Build automation hands-on: Write, review, and maintain Playwright tests yourself, covering critical user flows, APIs, and regression suites.
• Coach and grow the QA team: Lead our manual QA team through pairing, code reviews, and hands-on mentorship, upskilling into automation.
• Own the automation framework: Define the architecture, patterns, and conventions of our test framework for speed, reliability, and ease of contribution.
• Integrate quality into delivery: Embed automated tests into CI/CD pipelines so changes are validated before production.
• Test with AI agents: Use Claude Code and Cursor to accelerate test creation and maintenance while ensuring reliability.
• Define quality standards: Set acceptance criteria, test plans, and release readiness metrics with Product and Engineering.

Skills

QA leadership

Automation testing

API testing

CI/CD

Test data management

Web applications

Tools

Playwright

Claude Code

Cursor AI agents

CI/CD tooling

Job description

Defining the future of work & living globally

Baselane is a rapidly growing banking and financial management platform for individual landlords and real estate investors. We are backed by leading FinTech investors, including Activant Capital, Collaborative Fund, Conversion Capital, Diagram Ventures, ThomVest, and many FinTech leaders from PayPal, eBay, Google, and more.

We are building the future of financial services for the 12+ million individual landlords and real estate investors who own over 25 million homes in the United States. Our mission is to empower landlords with financial services, automated tools, and actionable insights to help them save time, increase their returns, and grow their investment portfolios.

We are a seasoned team with deep experience in financial services and technology. We have previously worked at companies including The Boston Consulting Group, Morgan Stanley, Plaid, Harry’s, Better, WealthSimple, RBC Ventures, Affirm, NorthOne, RazorPay, and more.

We operate in an AI-first engineering environment, where AI-powered development is at the core of how we design, build, and deliver software. As our engineers ship faster with AI coding agents, quality has to keep pace, and that means automation.

We’re looking for a hands-on QA Lead who is equally comfortable writing Playwright tests and leading a team of both manual and automation testers. This is a player-coach role: you’ll spend a significant part of your time building automation yourself, while guiding our manual QA team as they grow into automation, and help the engineering team write better test cases.

Expect roughly half your time hands-on in the codebase, building new automated tests, healing flaky or broken ones, and helping our engineers write better tests for the features they ship. You’ll set the quality strategy, lead by example, and work closely with Engineering, Product, Design, and DevOps to help our engineers own quality end-to-end. The other half focused on building the QA team and practice.

Our stack: React, TypeScript, Node.js, NestJS, GraphQL, PostgreSQL, and AWS. Our test stack is built around Playwright.

Core Responsibilities

Build automation hands-on: Write, review, and maintain Playwright tests yourself, covering critical user flows, APIs, and regression suites. You’ll be one of the most active contributors to our test codebase.

Coach and grow the QA team: Lead our manual QA team through pairing, code reviews, and hands-on mentorship, upskilling team members into automation and setting clear expectations for quality ownership.

Own the automation framework: Define the architecture, patterns, and conventions of our test framework so it stays fast, reliable, and easy for both QA and engineers to contribute to.

Integrate quality into delivery: Embed automated tests into CI/CD pipelines so every change is validated before it reaches production, and partner with DevOps on test environments and data.

Test with AI agents: Use tools like Claude Code and Cursor to accelerate test creation, maintenance, and debugging while owning the reliability of the output, and teach the team to do the same.

Define quality standards: Establish acceptance criteria, test plans, and release readiness standards with Product and Engineering, and track meaningful quality metrics (coverage, escaped defects, flakiness, cycle time).

Protect what matters most: Ensure high confidence in money-movement, banking, and compliance-sensitive flows where correctness is non-negotiable.

Key Requirements

7+ years in software quality, including 2+ years leading QA teams while remaining hands-on.

Experience testing web applications and APIs (GraphQL for main product, REST for partner endpoints), including test data management and environment setup.

Proven track record coaching manual testers into automation and integrating tests into CI/CD workflows.

Hands-on experience using AI coding agents (Claude Code, Cursor, or similar) to write and maintain tests, with the judgment to validate their output.

Strong communication skills and the ability to influence quality practices across engineering and product.

Experience testing AI/LLM-powered features: building eval sets (golden datasets), defining pass criteria for non-deterministic output, and running evals in CI to catch regressions from prompt or model changes.

Nice to Have

Experience in FinTech, banking, payments, or integrations with Stripe, Plaid, or BaaS providers.

Experience with performance, load, or security testing.

Experience with visual regression, contract testing, or test observability tooling.