QA Lead: Quality Strategy, Automation & Release Readiness

Integra Partners; Clayton (NC); Remote; USD 104,000 - 127,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Annual bonus

401(k) match

Life insurance

Medical benefits

PTO

Parental leave

Sick time

Holidays

Job summary

Integra Partners seeks a QA Lead to own the QA practice across product delivery, driving test strategy, execution, and release readiness. You will coach testers, collaborate with Product Owners and Engineering to embed quality, and implement risk-based testing with AI-assisted tools where appropriate.

Lead automation efforts, define QA metrics, and ensure transparency on test readiness and quality risk for leadership decisions.

Qualifications

• Significant hands-on experience in software quality assurance, including functional, integration, regression, and end-to-end testing.
• Experience leading QA execution, mentoring testers, or functioning as a senior/lead resource responsible for quality outcomes.
• Strong understanding of Agile/Scrum delivery and the role of QA throughout discovery, development, testing, UAT, and release.
• Demonstrated ability to create test strategies and translate complex business workflows into thorough, risk-based test coverage.
• Experience managing defects and facilitating effective triage with Product and Engineering.
• Working knowledge of test automation concepts, frameworks, and CI/CD practices.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills, including the ability to surface concerns early and communicate quality risk clearly to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Strong ownership mindset, organization, follow-through, and comfort operating in a fast-moving environment with multiple concurrent priorities.

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 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 commitments, 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.
• 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, where appropriate, to accelerate test-case creation, test-data design, automation development, and quality analysis while preserving human review.
• 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.
• Maintain a small, actionable set of QA metrics that reflect product quality and execution health rather than activity alone.
• Track measures such as test execution progress, escaped defects, defect severity, defect reopen rate, regression coverage, automation coverage, UAT rework, and recurring defect trends.
• Use metrics to identify systemic improvement opportunities and to show whether changes to process, automation, or requirements quality are producing measurable results.
• Provide concise status reporting that clearly states current quality, material risks, blockers, required decisions, and next actions.

Skills

QA leadership

Agile/Scrum

Test strategy

Defect management

CI/CD

Automation concepts

Tools

Jira

Confluence

Test management tools

CI/CD pipelines

Observability platforms

Job description

Integra Partners seeks a QA Lead to own the QA practice across product delivery, driving test strategy, execution, and release readiness. You will coach testers, collaborate with Product Owners and Engineering to embed quality, and implement risk-based testing with AI-assisted tools where appropriate.

Lead automation efforts, define QA metrics, and ensure transparency on test readiness and quality risk for leadership decisions.