JOB DESCRIPTION

QA Team Lead

Department

Quality Assurance

Reports To

Program Manager

Function

Engineering & QA

Direct Reports

QA Engineer(s)

Employment Type

Full-Time

Level

Team Lead

Role Summary

We're looking for a QA Team Lead to own quality across our product delivery lifecycle — from test planning through to release sign-off. This is a hands-on leadership role: you'll manage a team of QA Engineers, build and run a disciplined testing process, and act as the key quality checkpoint between Engineering, DevOps, and Product. You'll be equally comfortable coaching your team through a tricky defect triage and standing in front of stakeholders to explain why a release isn't ready yet.

We're a process-driven organisation with clearly defined quality gates, defect SLAs, and release readiness standards. You don't need to build this from scratch — but you do need to be excellent at running it, improving it, and holding the line when it matters.

What You'll Do

Team Leadership

- Lead, coach, and grow a team of QA Engineers — including workload planning, performance management, and skill development.

- Own hiring and onboarding for the QA team, including training new hires on our testing tools and quality standards.

- Run regular team retrospectives and turn recurring issues into concrete process improvements.

- Represent QA in sprint planning, backlog grooming, design reviews, and release meetings.

- Flag resourcing, tooling, or skills gaps to your manager early, backed by data (defect trends, coverage gaps, missed SLAs).

- Set the team's day-to-day rhythm: sprint-level test planning, defect triage, and monthly quality reporting.

Quality Process Ownership

- Own the end-to-end test planning process: requirements review, test strategy, test case design, test data preparation, execution, defect logging, retest, and sign-off.

- Make sure QA is involved from the start of each sprint — test coverage should be planned before development begins, not bolted on afterward.

- Keep core QA deliverables current every sprint: test plans, test cases mapped to acceptance criteria, test data, the regression suite, the defect log, and a release readiness summary.

- Run the required test types every sprint — functional and regression testing as standard, smoke testing after every deployment,



integration testing for API changes, and performance/security testing for major releases.

- Jointly own the Definition of Done with the development team — a story doesn't move forward until both development and QA have signed off.

- Own the handover checklist into user acceptance testing, confirming the technical side is ready before business stakeholders get involved.

- Maintain a clean, well-documented defect lifecycle — clear titles, severity ratings, reproduction steps, expected vs. actual behaviour, and environment details on every ticket.

- Enforce defect response times based on severity, escalating critical issues immediately and routine ones on a predictable cadence.

- Make sure nothing gets closed without being properly retested, and that visual or design-related issues get sign-off from the design team before being dismissed.

AI-Assisted Development Quality Checks

- Own the extra QA steps required whenever AI tools have been used in development — reviewing security scan results, checking that AI-referenced code libraries and functions are real and behave as expected, running full regression on any AI-touched code, and confirming any resulting technical debt gets logged.

- Apply the team's internal quality marker to any AI-assisted work once QA has signed off — this is what confirms the work is ready to move forward.

- Make sure the team never enters proprietary code, client data, or credentials into any AI tool.

Release & Cross-Functional Coordination

- Sign off on release readiness, confirming all planned work has cleared testing and no responsible defects remain open.

- Provide QA's security validation as part of the pre-release security review.

- Confirm regression results and coverage targets are met before a release is cleared for the next stage.

- Work closely with DevOps on any post-release issues, including confirming environment stability and supporting rollback decisions if something goes wrong.





- Act as QA's point of contact for the design team on visual or UX-related defects, and respond quickly when a design question needs QA input.

- Coordinate with Business Analysts on preparing acceptance testing scenarios.

- Report on team and quality metrics to your manager on a regular cadence.

What We're Looking For

Leadership & People Skills

- Proven experience managing and developing a QA team (8+ people), including performance conversations.

- Confident stakeholder management — you're comfortable representing QA to Product, Engineering, DevOps, and senior leadership.

- A track record of running structured retrospectives and turning quality data into real process improvements.

Process Discipline

- Experience building or running a structured, repeatable QA process — not ad hoc testing.

- Comfortable working with issue-tracking tools (e.g. JIRA), defect classification systems, and clear documentation standards.

- Used to working within multi-step approval processes and holding a firm line on quality standards, even under release pressure.

Technical Knowledge

- Solid grounding in the full testing lifecycle: functional, regression, smoke, integration, performance, and security testing.

- Familiarity with security scanning tools and vulnerability/dependency checks, and how to read their output.

- Working knowledge of CI/CD pipelines and environment structures (dev, QA, staging, UAT, production) and how QA fits into each stage.

- Comfortable with the idea of validating AI-assisted code — checking for issues like fabricated dependencies or silent regressions. No prior experience required; we'll provide training.

Experience

- 10+ years in Quality Assurance, including at least 2 years leading a QA team.

- Experience working in a structured, process-driven environment is a strong plus.

What Success Looks Like

In this role, you'll be measured on outcomes like:

Measure

Target

Defects caught before they reach client testing

Fewer than 1 in 20 slip through

Defects caught before they reach production

Fewer than 1 in 50 slip through

Test coverage on new code

80%+

On-time readiness for client testing

85%+ of the time

Regression pass rate per sprint

95%+

Team sign-off compliance rate

90%+

📌 Quality Assurance - Team Lead (India)
🏢 Leader IT
📍 India