Quality Engineering Lead

Element451; United States; On-site; USD 120,000 - 160,000; Full time

Job summary

Element451 is seeking a Head of Quality Engineering to own the quality system end-to-end. You will set strategy across the full SDLC, lead and grow a QA team, and hands-on test to ensure a high-quality product. You will drive AI-assisted testing and establish governance to maintain standards across the engineering org.

You’ll partner with Engineering and Product to embed quality as a system, not a gate, and shape how AI reshapes QA while staying technically deep and hands-on.

Qualifications

• 7+ years in quality engineering with leadership experience.
• Experience growing and coaching QA teams.
• Hands-on production-grade test coding and tooling.
• Own quality system across the full SDLC.

Responsibilities

• Set quality strategy across the full SDLC and shift-left practices.
• Lead, manage, and grow the quality engineering team.
• Build end-to-end automation suite and test observability.
• Define metrics and dashboards for quality.
• Pilot AI-assisted testing and governance.
• Stay hands-on writing tests for high-risk work.
• Partner with Engineering and Product to own quality discipline.

Skills

Quality leadership

Hands-on testing

Playwright

AI in QA

Test observability

Communication

Tools

Playwright

CI/CD tooling

Job description

Element451 is building the AI‑powered platform reshaping how colleges and universities recruit, enroll, and support their students — and quality is how we earn the trust of the institutions that run on us. This is a rare chance to own and build a modern quality system end to end: set the strategy, build the team and infrastructure that deliver it, and lead how a high‑performing engineering org bakes quality in across the full lifecycle. If you want to shape a discipline rather than inherit one — and you believe quality engineering is being reinvented by AI right now — you’ll feel at home here.

The Role

You’ll own quality engineering at Element451 — the strategy, the system, and the team that delivers it. This is a player‑coach role: most of your time goes to leading — managing and growing a team of quality engineers, setting quality strategy across the full SDLC, and building the systems, tooling, and practices that make it real — and you stay hands‑on in the testing itself, because you can’t curate a quality system you’ve stopped practicing.

Quality here is an enablement function, not a gate. Your team isn’t the bug‑finder of last resort between engineering and release; you build the personas, journeys, infrastructure, agents, and signals that let every engineer hit a high bar themselves. It’s also an explicitly AI‑forward role: we expect you to bring thought leadership on how agentic AI reshapes quality work and to operationalize it across your team.

What You’ll Own

• Set and own quality strategy across the full SDLC — shift‑left into refinement and design, define release‑quality signals, and lead production escape analysis.
• Lead, manage, and grow the quality engineering team — hire, coach, set standards, and develop QEs into force multipliers for the engineers they partner with.
• Build and curate the quality system — the persona and journey model, the end‑to‑end automation suite, the test observability layer (flake, escape, time‑to‑feedback, coverage), and the shared tooling developers rely on — as a living product your team delivers.
• Make quality measurable and legible — define the metrics that matter and the dashboards that surface them.
• Champion agentic AI across the practice — pilot and scale AI‑assisted test generation and agent‑based testing, own the evaluation discipline for our AI features, and set the human‑in‑the‑loop governance that holds AI‑assisted work to the same bar as anything written by hand.
• Stay hands‑on — design and write tests on high‑risk work, set patterns by example, and keep your technical depth current.
• Partner across Engineering and Product as the owner of the quality discipline — drive cross‑cutting initiatives and represent quality in how the org plans and ships.

How You’ll Show Up

• Lives our values, and builds team culture through behavior, not policy.
• Leads as a force multiplier — measures success by the org’s quality outcomes and the engineers the system makes better, not by the bugs they personally find.
• Is excellent by default, and holds the quality system to a higher standard than the minimum.
• Leads with service — treats developer enablement as core to the job.
• Puts the team and product first — partners with engineering and product rather than positioning quality as a separate gate.
• Communicates with clarity and honesty — surfaces signal and risk proactively.
• Treats feedback as a gift, and gives it to the team generously and well.

What You Bring

• 7+ years in quality engineering, including proven experience leading quality practices, teams, or processes in a complex, multi‑tenant SaaS product.
• Experience managing and growing engineers — hiring, coaching, setting standards, and developing a team that delivers.
• Strong, current hands‑on engineering skills — you write and review production‑quality test code and build tooling. Quality engineering here is a building role, and the Lead is no exception.
• A track record owning a quality system across the full SDLC — persona‑ and journey‑based E2E strategy, test observability, release quality, and shift‑left practices.
• Practical depth with modern test automation; Playwright or comparable browser automation is highly relevant, and contract testing (Pact‑style) is a plus.
• The ability to own quality for our AI features — prompt evaluation, golden datasets, hallucination and safety testing, output regression — and to stand that discipline up quickly. Direct experience is a strong plus; the requirement is the judgment and engineering ability to build it.
• Genuine thought leadership in agentic AI for quality — current, hands‑on fluency with agentic tooling across the quality lifecycle, and a point of view on operationalizing and governing it. We’re a Cursor shop; Claude Code, Codex, or comparable tools are equally valued.
• Comfort with the quality‑as‑system‑owner, enablement‑not‑gate framing. If your prior orgs treated QA as the gate, this role will feel different — and that difference is the point.
• Excellent written communication — strategy docs, playbooks, and standards that stand on their own.

Our Values

• Impactful not Immediate — We prioritize and invest in initiatives that will be most impactful.
• Progress before Perfection — We are action‑oriented people. We are empowered to make decisions and achieve our goals.
• Learners before Masters — We are curious and humble people who strive to constantly improve.
• Together not Alone — We rally behind each other and pitch in to support the greater whole.
• Customer Success not Support — We solve partner goals and prioritize their success.

Our Interview Process

Our process is rigorous and designed to be real signal — for you and for us. Expect live, interactive technical and leadership assessment with our engineers and leaders, not take‑home busywork or trivia. You’ll show how you think about a quality system, how you lead a team, and how you apply and govern AI tooling in real time. We move quickly for the right people and give you a clear view of the bar before you accept.