QA Architect

About the role

You'll be the technical authority on how quality is engineered: setting the standard SDETs build against, moving quality earlier in the lifecycle, and using AI to materially reduce the cost of testing. This is an architect role, not a management one. Your influence will come from the quality of your designs, your presence in architecture reviews, and your credibility with engineers who don't report to you.

Key responsibilities

• Define, document and champion a multi-year quality engineering strategy tied to business objectives
• Establish what gets tested at which layer (unit, integration, contract, E2E), by whom, and with what exit criteria — and get teams to converge on it
• Set standards for test code quality, framework design patterns, maintainability and flake management that SDETs build against
• Own the tooling roadmap: evaluate, consolidate and make build-vs-buy calls across existing and future toolchain
• Run architecture review sessions for test design, and mentor senior SDETs on framework and automation design
• Embed in product design and architecture reviews to identify quality risk before code is written
• Define what "testable by design" means and hold new designs to it
• Move quality signal earlier in the pipeline so failures surface at the right layer
• Define where AI genuinely reduces cost in testing lifecycle and evaluate AI-assisted testing tooling
• Design test data management strategy, environment strategy and resilience testing approach

About you

• 10+ years in software quality engineering or software development, including 3+ years at principal, staff, lead SDET or architect level
• Expert-level coding in Python or TypeScript with real software design pattern fluency
• Proven track record designing a test automation framework that other engineers adopted at scale
• Hands-on experience applying AI to quality engineering, with quantifiable results
• Hands-on CI/CD pipeline design (GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Jenkins or Azure DevOps) and containerised execution (Docker, Kubernetes)
• Practical experience with Playwright or equivalent modern browser automation, plus API and contract testing
• Test data management at scale
• Cloud platform experience (AWS, Azure or GCP)
• Demonstrated ability to change how engineers work without having authority over them