AI Experience | AQA | Remote | Fintech | Product company
About the role We are a remote payroll company transforming how our engineering organization builds software. We are moving from traditional cross-functional teams to lean squads of 2–3 fullstack engineers who own quality end-to-end, heavily supported by AI tooling.
We need a hands-on quality lead who will build and maintain the horizontal quality layer across our entire product: the frameworks, tooling, automation, and practices that empower every engineer to ship with confidence.
This is a foundational, hands-on role. You will not manage a traditional QA team. Instead, you will be the person who writes the shared test infrastructure, builds the automation pipelines. You will be deep in the code every day while shaping quality as a discipline across the organization.
What you will do Strategy and leadership:
• Define and own the company-wide quality strategy, standards, and testing philosophy for a payroll product where correctness is critical
• Build the horizontal quality infrastructure that all engineering squads rely on—shared test frameworks, CI/CD quality gates, monitoring, and alerting
• Establish quality metrics and dashboards that give engineering leadership and squads real-time visibility into product health
• Drive the cultural shift where every engineer thinks and acts as a quality owner, not just a feature builder
Tooling and automation:
• Design and implement AI-augmented testing workflows: AI-generated test suites, intelligent regression detection, and automated exploratory testing
• Build and maintain shared testing infrastructure across our stack (PHP/Laravel,Node.js/NestJS, React/TypeScript) on AWS
• Create self-service quality tooling that squads can adopt without hand-holding—documentation, templates, and guardrails baked into the developer workflow• Evaluate and integrate AI testing tools into the CI/CD pipeline to maximize coverage with minimal manual effort
Collaboration and enablement:
• Partner with engineering squads as a quality advisor—reviewing test strategies, helping with complex edge cases, and coaching engineers on testing best practices
• Work closely with product to understand risk profiles of different features and calibrate testing effort accordingly
• Own the release quality process: defining what “ready to ship” means and ensuring squads have the tools to meet that bar independently
• Lead incident postmortems from a quality perspective and turn findings into systemic improvements, not just individual fixes
Requirements: Must-haves:
• 6+ years in software quality, test engineering, or SDET roles with demonstrated technical leadership and hands-on delivery
• Deep hands-on experience building test automation frameworks and CI/CD quality pipelines at scale
• Strong programming skills—you can write production-grade test infrastructure, not just test cases.
• Proven track record of building quality practices in organizations without embedded QA—you have enabled developers to own quality successfully
• Experience with AI-assisted testing tools and workflows, with a clear vision for how AI changes the quality discipline
• Deep understanding of testing in domains where correctness matters: payroll, fintech, healthcare, or similar regulated/high-stakes environments
• Excellent communication and influence skills—you can drive adoption of quality practices across autonomous teams without positional authority
• Experience with AWS infrastructure, observability tools, and production monitoring
• Advanced spoken and written English skills
Nice-to-haves:
• Experience in payroll or HR tech specifically
• Background in building internal developer platforms or developer experience tooling
• Familiarity with contract testing, property-based testing, or formal verification approaches
• Experience leading quality transformation during an organizational restructuring• Contributions to open-source testing tools or published thought leadership on quality
engineering
Why This Role Is Different This is not a traditional QA manager role and there is no QA team to manage. You are a hands- on engineer first and a leader second—someone who builds the quality platform and culture that makes dedicated QA unnecessary at the squad level.
What this means in practice:
• You are a force multiplier, not a gatekeeper—your success is measured by how confidently and quickly squads ship, not by how many bugs you catch
• You build systems and tooling, not manual test plans—automation and AI are your primary instruments
• You influence through expertise and enablement, not through control—engineers adopt your frameworks because they make their lives easier
• You work closely with engineering leadership and have direct input into how we evolve our development practices
• You are joining during a foundational moment—this role shapes how quality works across the entire company for years to come
Interview process * Call with the recruiter * Technical Interview * Cultural fit interview with the Client
Benefit offerings include: * 20 paid vacation days annually * Paid public holidays based on your country of residence * Unlimited sick leaves * Comprehensive premium health insurance coverage
Interested? Let’s connect and discuss the details!