Staff QA Engineer

Remote (United States)

Job Details

Employment Type: Full-Time

Annual Salary Range: $170,000 - $210,000 per year

Additional Compensation and Benefits: Health insurance and equity

About the Role

This opportunity is for a Staff QA Engineer who will own and continuously evolve the quality assurance function for a rapidly growing AI-powered software platform. This is a highly autonomous, hands-on technical leadership role focused on defining the organization’s approach to quality, advancing test automation, and ensuring every release meets high standards for reliability, performance, and user experience.

This is not a traditional quality assurance position. The role requires a combination of deep technical expertise, strong product judgment, customer awareness, and the ability to build scalable systems that enable teams to release software with confidence.

The Staff QA Engineer will establish the technical direction for quality assurance, create scalable testing frameworks and processes, champion quality across multiple departments, and use artificial intelligence to modernize testing workflows. This position has significant autonomy to select tools, introduce new technologies, and improve how software is developed, tested, and released.

What You’ll Do

Own the QA Strategy

• Own and evolve the organization’s overall quality assurance strategy
• Establish scalable QA processes that support rapid and high-confidence software releases
• Define quality standards, release criteria, and testing best practices across the organization
• Continuously improve how software quality is measured, communicated, and maintained
• Identify opportunities to shift quality earlier in the software development lifecycle through improved tooling, automation, and processes
• Maintain clear ownership and accountability for quality across releases

Lead Test Automation

• Set the technical direction for the automated testing strategy
• Design, build, and maintain scalable automated testing frameworks
• Integrate automated testing frameworks into CI/CD pipelines
• Evaluate and implement testing tools, frameworks, and architecture that support long-term software quality and engineering velocity
• Continuously expand automated test coverage
• Reduce reliance on manual testing through effective and maintainable automation
• Drive the continued evolution of automation capabilities as the product and engineering organization scale
• Make informed decisions regarding testing tools, architecture, and technical implementation

Champion Product Quality

• Develop a deep understanding of customer workflows, product functionality, and business priorities
• Approach testing from the customer’s perspective
• Proactively identify edge cases, failure modes, usability concerns, and product risks before they reach production
• Distinguish critical release blockers from lower-priority defects
• Balance quality standards with release speed and business priorities
• Partner with Product teams to recommend improvements that strengthen the customer experience
• Go beyond defect identification by helping improve product design, usability, and reliability

Lead Cross-Functional Quality Initiatives

• Champion quality across Engineering, Product, Customer Success, Product Operations, and other cross-functional teams
• Coordinate testing activities across multiple teams while maintaining clear ownership and accountability
• Partner with Customer Success to reproduce complex customer-reported issues
• Translate customer issues into clear and actionable test cases
• Validate fixes before they are released to customers
• Influence Engineering and Product teams to improve quality throughout the software development lifecycle
• Communicate quality risks, release readiness, testing results, and priorities clearly across technical and nontechnical teams

Use AI to Modernize Quality Assurance

• Evaluate and implement AI-powered workflows that improve testing efficiency and release confidence
• Use artificial intelligence to generate and improve test cases
• Apply AI-assisted tools to build and maintain automated tests
• Use AI to accelerate exploratory testing
• Apply AI-assisted analysis to investigate test failures and identify potential causes
• Use AI tools to identify regression risk and prioritize testing efforts
• Continuously explore new ways to make quality assurance faster, smarter, and more scalable
• Help establish AI-assisted testing as a core part of the organization’s quality strategy

Qualifications

Required Experience

• 7+ years of experience in Software Quality Assurance
• Significant professional experience with test automation
• Experience independently owning a quality assurance function in a fast-paced software organization
• Proven ability to design and implement scalable QA processes
• Proven ability to define and execute comprehensive test automation strategies
• Experience establishing quality standards, release criteria, and testing best practices
• Strong product judgment and the ability to understand complex user workflows
• Ability to advocate for an exceptional user experience
• Experience driving quality initiatives across multiple cross-functional teams
• Ability to work with a high degree of autonomy and make independent technical decisions

Technical Qualifications

• Strong experience with modern automation frameworks such as Playwright, Cypress, or Selenium
• Experience testing AI-powered or large language model products
• Experience building or significantly evolving a QA function within a growing startup environment
• Proficiency in one or more programming languages
• Experience integrating automated tests into CI/CD pipelines
• Experience with CI/CD tools such as GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, or Jenkins
• Experience with API testing
• Experience with integration testing
• Experience with regression testing
• Experience with end-to-end testing
• Familiarity with modern bug-tracking tools
• Familiarity with modern test-management tools
• Experience implementing AI-assisted testing workflows