QA Lead: Automate, Align & Assure Quality

Integra Partners; Illinois; Remote; USD 104,000 - 127,000; Full time

Job summary

Integra Partners is seeking a QA Lead to drive the quality assurance practice across product delivery. You will lead day-to-day QA planning, strengthen automation, coach team members, and partner with Product Owners and Engineering to embed quality throughout the SDLC.

You will establish test strategies for features, defects, and platform changes, ensuring end-to-end coverage and early risk identification. The role emphasizes transparency, metrics, and proactive defect triage in a fast-paced

Qualifications

• Significant hands-on experience in software QA across functional, integration, regression and end-to-end testing.
• Experience leading QA execution, mentoring testers, or acting as a senior/lead resource.
• Strong understanding of Agile/Scrum and the QA role through discovery to release.
• Ability to create test strategies and map complex workflows to risk-based coverage.
• Experience managing defects and facilitating effective triage with Product and Engineering.
• Knowledge of test automation concepts, frameworks, and CI/CD practices.
• Strong communication and ownership in a fast-moving, multi-priority environment.

Responsibilities

• Own day-to-day QA practice and establish consistent expectations for test planning, execution, documentation, and release readiness.
• Ensure QA work begins when planned and that delays, blockers, environment issues, data needs, or scope gaps are identified and communicated immediately.
• Create transparency into what has been tested, what remains untested, current defects, quality risks, and confidence in release readiness.
• HOLD QA team members accountable for execution, timely updates, accurate status reporting, and follow-through.
• Coach QA team members on testing discipline, risk-based thinking, root-cause analysis, and stronger ownership of outcomes.
• Develop and maintain test strategies for new features, enhancements, integrations, defects, and platform changes.
• Partner with Product Owners early in discovery and refinement to identify test scenarios, edge cases, data needs, dependencies, and acceptance criteria before development is complete.
• Ensure test cases provide adequate functional, integration, regression, negative, end-to-end, and workflow coverage based on business and technical risk.
• Coordinate test data, environments, integrations, and dependencies required for successful QA execution.
• Confirm that critical workflows can be tested end-to-end before work is considered ready for business UAT.
• Use risk-based testing to prioritize the highest-value scenarios when time or environment constraints require tradeoffs.
• Lead defect triage in partnership with Product and Engineering, ensuring severity, priority, business impact, and ownership are clear.
• Track critical defects through resolution and retest and ensure unresolved quality risks are explicitly documented before release decisions.
• Define and enforce practical QA exit criteria, including expectations for critical defect closure, regression completion, and stability.
• Provide an objective quality recommendation for releases based on test evidence and known risk.
• Identify recurring defect patterns and partner with Engineering and Product on preventive actions rather than relying only on downstream testing.
• Develop a pragmatic test automation strategy focused on high-value regression, repeatable workflows, integrations, and business-critical scenarios.
• Partner with QA Automation Engineers and Engineering to increase reliable automated coverage without creating brittle or low-value automation.
• Use modern AI-assisted tools, where appropriate, to accelerate test-case creation, test-data design, automation development, and quality analysis while preserving human review and accountability.
• Evaluate test tooling, frameworks, and processes and recommend improvements that increase efficiency, coverage, and maintainability.
• Reduce manual regression effort over time by identifying the strongest candidates for automation and incorporating automated tests into delivery pipelines where feasible.

Skills

QA leadership

Agile/Scrum

Test strategy

Defect triage

Automation concepts

Communication

Tools

Jira

Confluence

CI/CD practices

Job description

Integra Partners is seeking a QA Lead to drive the quality assurance practice across product delivery. You will lead day-to-day QA planning, strengthen automation, coach team members, and partner with Product Owners and Engineering to embed quality throughout the SDLC.

You will establish test strategies for features, defects, and platform changes, ensuring end-to-end coverage and early risk identification. The role emphasizes transparency, metrics, and proactive defect triage in a fast-paced