QA Manager: Hands-On Strategy & Automation Lead

Atlantic Media; Washington (District of Columbia); On-site; USD 145,000 - 165,000; Full time

Job summary

The Atlantic seeks a hands-on, strategic QA Manager to build and own our engineering quality practice in Washington, DC. This player-coach role blends testing, automation, and process leadership across the org, including vendor relationships and offshore partnerships.

You’ll define testing standards, embed quality into cross-functional teams, and guide AI‑powered features testing while ensuring fast, reliable deployments and shared ownership of quality.

Qualifications

• 7+ years QA experience, with at least 2 years in a lead or senior QA role.
• Hands-on experience with test automation frameworks (Playwright, Selenium, Cypress, or similar).
• Experience managing QA contractors, vendors, or offshore testing teams.
• Experience developing or significantly improving QA processes and standards within an engineering organization.
• Strong understanding of software development lifecycles and agile/CI-CD practices.
• Experience integrating automated tests into CI/CD pipelines (GitHub Actions or similar).

Responsibilities

• Own the engineering quality practice: define testing standards, processes, and tooling.
• Manage the day-to-day relationship with our offshore QA partner and oversee five QA contractors.
• Work hands-on as a practitioner—design test strategies, write automated tests, and contribute directly to quality.
• Partner with multiple engineering teams to embed quality practices into workflows.
• Define and uphold quality standards for AI-powered features and LLM testing approaches.
• Integrate quality gates into CI/CD pipelines to enable fast deployments.
• Identify testing gaps and surface risks to engineering leadership.
• Track quality metrics and report trends to leadership and stakeholders.
• Foster a culture of shared ownership around quality across teams.
• Participate in on-call rotation to monitor production incidents.

Skills

QA leadership

Vendor management

QA process improvement

SDLC & CI/CD

On-call & incident response

Collaborative leadership

Communication

Tools

Playwright

Selenium

Cypress

CI/CD tooling (GitHub Actions)

AI testing tools

Visual regression tools

Accessibility testing

Observability tools (Datadog, Sentry)

Job description

The Atlantic seeks a hands-on, strategic QA Manager to build and own our engineering quality practice in Washington, DC. This player-coach role blends testing, automation, and process leadership across the org, including vendor relationships and offshore partnerships.

You’ll define testing standards, embed quality into cross-functional teams, and guide AI‑powered features testing while ensuring fast, reliable deployments and shared ownership of quality.