Quality Assurance Engineering Lead — Hands-On Team Builder

Future Secure AI Inc.; Austin (TX); Hybrid; USD 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Flexible work environment

Competitive salary

Huge growth trajectory

Job summary

Future Secure AI is seeking a Quality Assurance Engineering Lead to build and lead the QA team while staying hands-on with testing. This player-coach role is ~70% people leadership and ~30% individual contributor work on priority releases.

The ideal candidate will scale the team, maintain QA strategy, and drive automation initiatives. A strong background in Selenium/JUnit/TestNG and CI/CD is required, with experience in Agile environments.

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, hands-on with testing.
• Strong proficiency in manual and automated testing with Selenium/JUnit/TestNG.
• Experience with CI/CD tooling and integrating QA into deployment pipelines (e.g., Jenkins, GitLab CI).
• 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 to stakeholders.
• Ability to prioritize and switch between 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, 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 ensure requirements are covered.
• Drive adoption of automation frameworks and tooling to improve testing efficiency.
• Own QA's integration into CI/CD pipelines, partnering with DevOps to optimize 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

Leadership

Manual testing

Automated testing

Selenium

JUnit

TestNG

CI/CD

Jenkins

GitLab CI

Agile/Scrum

Test planning

Performance testing

Security testing

Education

Bachelor's degree in CS/IS

Tools

Selenium

JUnit

TestNG

Jenkins

GitLab CI

Job description

Future Secure AI is seeking a Quality Assurance Engineering Lead to build and lead the QA team while staying hands-on with testing. This player-coach role is ~70% people leadership and ~30% individual contributor work on priority releases.

The ideal candidate will scale the team, maintain QA strategy, and drive automation initiatives. A strong background in Selenium/JUnit/TestNG and CI/CD is required, with experience in Agile environments.