Quality Assurance Lead

Integra Partners; Oregon; Hybrid; USD 104,000 - 127,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Annual bonus

401(k) with company match

Medical, Vision, and Dental

PTO

Parental leave

Life insurance

Short-term disability

Company-sponsored events

Job summary

Integra Partners is seeking a QA Lead to own the QA practice across product delivery, ensuring test readiness and timely defect surfacing. You will lead day-to-day planning, expand automation, and coach team members while partnering with Product Owners and Engineering to embed quality throughout the SDLC.

This role requires strong visibility into test readiness and risk, effective defect triage, and the ability to drive quality improvements with measurable metrics.

Qualifications

• Significant hands-on software QA experience across functional, integration, regression, and end-to-end testing.
• Experience leading QA execution and mentoring testers.
• Strong understanding of Agile/Scrum delivery and the QA role across discovery, development, testing, UAT, and release.
• Ability to translate complex 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 and ownership in a fast-moving environment.

Responsibilities

• Own the day-to-day QA practice and establish consistent expectations for test planning, execution, documentation, and release readiness.
• Lead defect triage and ensure clear ownership, severity, and business impact.
• Develop and maintain test strategies for new features, integrations, and platform changes.
• Coordinate test data, environments, dependencies, and end-to-end testing readiness.
• Provide objective quality recommendations for releases based on evidence and risk.
• Partner with Product Owners and Engineering to embed quality throughout the SDLC.

Skills

QA leadership

Test strategy

Agile/Scrum

Regression testing

Defect triage

Test automation

CI/CD

Stakeholder comms

Tools

Jira

Confluence

Test management tools

CI/CD pipelines

Observability platforms

AI-assisted tools

Job description

The QA Lead is accountable for the quality assurance practice across product delivery, ensuring that software is testable, test execution is timely and transparent, critical defects are surfaced early, and releases meet agreed quality standards. This role leads day-to-day QA planning and execution, strengthens automation and regression coverage, coaches QA team members, and works closely with Product Owners and Engineering to embed quality throughout the software development lifecycle rather than treating testing as a final-stage activity.The QA Lead is expected to create clear visibility into test readiness, progress, risk, and blockers. The role owns the operating discipline of QA: defining test approaches, ensuring execution begins when planned, maintaining useful quality metrics, driving defect triage, and escalating issues early when delivery or release quality is at risk.

Quality Leadership & Accountability

• 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.

Test Strategy, Planning & Execution

• 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.

Defect Management & Release Readiness

• 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.

Automation & Continuous Improvement

• 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 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.

Cross-Functional Partnership

• 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.

Metrics & Reporting

• 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.

Required 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.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience testing complex enterprise applications, healthcare technology, claims, payments, utilization management, provider data, EDI, APIs, or other heavy integration workflows.
• Experience with automated API, UI, regression, and integration testing.
• Experience using AI-assisted development or testing tools such as Microsoft Copilot, GitHub Copilot, or comparable tools.
• Familiarity with Jira, Confluence, test-management tools, CI/CD pipelines, observability platforms, and cloud-based application environments.
• Experience helping a QA organization mature from primarily manual testing toward a balanced automation and risk-based quality model.

Success Measures

• QA execution starts on time, with blockers surfaced immediately rather than discovered later.
• Leaders and delivery teams have clear visibility into test progress and release risk.
• Critical defects are identified earlier in the lifecycle, and fewer defects escape into UAT or production.
• UAT rework and repeated defect patterns decline over time.
• Regression coverage becomes increasingly reliable, repeatable, and automated.
• QA team members demonstrate stronger ownership, consistency, technical capability, and accountability.
• Release decisions are supported by objective test evidence and clearly documented risk.

Leadership Expectations

The QA Lead is expected to model transparency, ownership, and proactive communication. Problems do not need to be perfectly solved before they are raised. When quality, timing, environment stability, or test readiness is at risk, the expectation is to surface the issue early, explain the impact, and drive the appropriate next action with the delivery team.

Salary: $115,000/Annually

Benefits Offered

• Competitive compensation and annual bonus program
• 401(k) retirement program with company match
• Company-paid life insurance
• Company-paid short term disability coverage (location restrictions may apply)
• Medical, Vision, and Dental benefits
• Paid Time Off (PTO)
• Paid Parental Leave
• Sick Time
• Paid company holidays and floating holidays
• Quarterly company-sponsored events
• Health and wellness programs
• Career development opportunities

Remote Opportunities

We are actively seeking new colleagues in: Arizona, Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Illinois, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Michigan, North Carolina, Nevada, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, and Washington.