Remote QA Lead: Test Strategy & Release Readiness

Integra Partners; Lexington (KY); Remote; USD 104,000 - 127,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Annual bonus

401(k) match

Life insurance

Short term disability

Medical benefits

Paid time off

Parental leave

Sick time

Company holidays

Wellness programs

Career development

Job summary

Integra Partners is seeking a QA Lead to own the day‑to‑day QA practice, drive test strategy, and ensure release readiness. You will collaborate with Product and Engineering to define risk‑based test approaches and guide teams to deliver high‑quality software in a fast‑paced environment.

This role emphasizes mentoring, defect management, and automation initiatives, with opportunities across healthcare technology and integrations.

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 workflows into 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; surface concerns early and communicate risk clearly.
• Strong ownership mindset, organization, follow-through, and comfort operating in a fast-moving environment with multiple priorities.

Responsibilities

• 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.
• 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 trade‑offs.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.

Skills

QA leadership

Agile/Scrum

Test strategy

Risk-based testing

Defect management

Automation concepts

Communication

Ownership & accountability

Tools

Jira

Confluence

CI/CD pipelines

Observability platforms

Cloud environments

Job description

Integra Partners is seeking a QA Lead to own the day‑to‑day QA practice, drive test strategy, and ensure release readiness. You will collaborate with Product and Engineering to define risk‑based test approaches and guide teams to deliver high‑quality software in a fast‑paced environment.

This role emphasizes mentoring, defect management, and automation initiatives, with opportunities across healthcare technology and integrations.