QA Lead: Drive Quality, Automation & Release Readiness

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

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive compensation and annual-b}

Company-paid life insurance

Company-paid short term disability

Medical, Vision, and Dental benefits

Paid Time Off (PTO)

Paid Parental Leave

Sick Time

Paid company holidays and floating

Quarterly company-sponsored events

Health and wellness programs

Career development opportunities

Job summary

Integra Partners in the United States seeks a QA Lead to own the QA practice across product delivery, ensuring testability, timely test execution, and early defect surfacing. You will lead planning, strengthen automation, coach team, and partner with Product Owners and Engineering to embed quality throughout the software lifecycle.

The role requires driving test strategies, risk-based testing, and metrics to support release readiness.

Qualifications

• Extensive QA experience across functional, integration, regression and end-to-end testing.
• Experience leading QA, mentoring testers, and driving quality outcomes.
• Strong Agile/Scrum QA understanding across lifecycle.
• Ability to create test strategies and map workflows to risk-based coverage.
• Defect management and triage with Product/Engineering.
• Knowledge of test automation concepts, frameworks, and CI/CD.
• Strong communication to surface quality risk.
• Ownership, organization and follow-through.

Responsibilities

• Own the day-to-day QA practice and establish consistent expectations for test planning, execution, documentation, and release readiness.
• Ensure QA work begins when planned and communicate blockers immediately.
• Create transparency into what has been tested, what remains, defects, risks, and release confidence.
• Coach QA team members on testing discipline, risk-based thinking, and root-cause analysis.
• 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 and maintain 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 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.
• Work closely with Product Owners to ensure requirements and acceptance criteria are clear, testable, and aligned to expected business outcomes.
• Partner with Engineering on defect prevention, unit/integration test expectations, environment stability, observability, and root-cause analysis.
• Collaborate with Architecture and platform teams when quality issues involve integration, infrastructure, data movement, or systemic technical risk.
• Support business UAT by ensuring the product is genuinely ready for validation and by helping distinguish blocking defects from non-blocking follow-up work.
• Communicate quality risk in clear business terms so leadership can make informed release and prioritization decisions.

Skills

QA experience

QA leadership

Agile QA

Test strategy

Defect management

Test automation

Communication

Ownership

Enterprise apps

API testing

AI tools

Jira/Confluence

QA maturity

Tools

Jira

Confluence

Job description

Integra Partners in the United States seeks a QA Lead to own the QA practice across product delivery, ensuring testability, timely test execution, and early defect surfacing. You will lead planning, strengthen automation, coach team, and partner with Product Owners and Engineering to embed quality throughout the software lifecycle.

The role requires driving test strategies, risk-based testing, and metrics to support release readiness.