Quality Assurance Engineering Lead

Future Secure AI; Austin (TX); On-site; USD 140,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

Future Secure AI in Austin seeks a Quality Assurance Engineering Lead to build and lead our QA team while staying hands-on with testing. This player-coach role is roughly 70% people leadership and 30% individual contributor work, with the balance shifting toward leadership as the team scales.

The ideal candidate will hire, develop, and manage QA engineers, design test plans, own QA strategy, and drive automation adoption across CI/CD pipelines.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, or related field.
• 6+ years of software QA experience with 2+ years directly managing a QA team.
• Comfortable balancing management with hands-on testing.
• Strong proficiency in manual and automated testing using Selenium, JUnit, TestNG.
• Experience with CI/CD tooling (Jenkins, GitLab CI) and integrating QA into deployment pipelines.
• Solid understanding of Agile/Scrum methodologies.
• Strong people leadership and communication skills.
• Ability to prioritize and manage both strategic and hands-on work in a fast-paced environment.

Responsibilities

• Build and grow the QA team, including hiring, onboarding, and setting performance expectations.
• Manage day-to-day team operations: workload distribution, 1:1s, performance reviews, and career development.
• Personally execute hands-on testing (functional, regression, performance, security) on priority features or releases.
• Own QA strategy and roadmap, aligning testing priorities with product and engineering goals.
• Design and maintain test plans, working with development teams to cover requirements.
• Drive adoption of automation frameworks and tooling to improve testing efficiency.
• Own QA integration into CI/CD pipelines with DevOps for optimized test execution.
• Track and report quality metrics to leadership.
• Lead root-cause analysis on significant quality escapes and drive improvements.
• Represent QA in cross-functional planning and architecture reviews.

Skills

QA leadership

Manual testing

Automated testing

Selenium

JUnit

TestNG

CI/CD

Jenkins

Agile/Scrum

People management

Test strategy

Education

Bachelor's degree in CS/IS

Tools

Selenium

JUnit

TestNG

Jenkins

GitLab CI

Job description

At Future Secure AI, we're building something genuinely new — and we're looking for people bold enough to build it with us. We work at the frontier of AI, tackling big, real-world problems for global enterprises across multiple industries, armed with state-of-the-art technology and a culture that prizes courage, rigor, and relentless curiosity. Our BRAVER values aren't just words on a wall — they describe the kind of people we are and the standard we hold ourselves to every day. Our leadership team is entrepreneurial, experienced, and accessible, with an open-door policy that means you'll never be just a number here. We invest seriously in your growth because we know our success depends on yours. If you're ready to work alongside some of the brightest minds in the industry, push into uncharted territory, and do work that genuinely matters, Future Secure AI is the place for you.

About the Role
We are hiring a Quality Assurance Engineering Lead to build and lead our quality assurance team while staying hands-on with testing. This is a player-coach role by design: roughly 70% people leadership (hiring, developing, and managing QA engineers) and 30% individual contributor work (hands-on testing on priority releases). As the team scales, we expect this balance to shift toward more people leadership. The ideal candidate wants both the impact of building a team and the satisfaction of staying technically close to the product.

Responsibilities

• Build and grow the QA team, including hiring, onboarding, and setting performance expectations
• Manage day-to-day team operations: workload distribution, 1:1s, performance reviews, and career development
• Personally execute hands-on testing (functional, regression, performance, security) on priority features or releases, staying close to the product
• Own QA strategy and roadmap, aligning testing priorities with product and engineering goals
• Design and maintain test plans, working directly with development teams to ensure requirements are covered
• Drive adoption of automation frameworks and tooling to improve testing efficiency and reduce manual overhead
• Own QA's integration into CI/CD pipelines, partnering with DevOps to optimize test execution and feedback loops
• Track and report quality metrics (defect escape rate, test coverage, release readiness) to leadership
• Lead root-cause analysis on significant quality escapes and drive process improvements
• Represent QA in cross-functional planning and architecture reviews, advocating for testability and quality standards

Minimum Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, or related field
• 6+ years of experience in software QA, with 2+ years directly managing a QA team (hiring, performance reviews, staffing)
• Comfortable operating as both a manager and an individual contributor, with a genuine interest in staying technically hands-on rather than moving fully into management
• Strong proficiency in manual and automated testing, with hands-on experience in tools such as Selenium, JUnit, TestNG
• Experience with CI/CD tooling (e.g., Jenkins, GitLab CI) and integrating QA into deployment pipelines
• Solid understanding of Agile/Scrum methodologies
• Strong people leadership skills: hiring, mentoring, conflict resolution, performance management
• Excellent problem-solving and communication skills, able to translate quality risk for technical and non-technical stakeholders
• Ability to prioritize and switch between strategic and hands-on work in a fast-paced environment

Why Join Us?

• A high-performance culture
• State-of-the-art technology
• Experience world-class leadership
• Scale of impact and purpose
• A competitive salary and a huge growth trajectory
• Work with the best in the industry
• Flexible work environment
• Diversity and creativity

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