Requirements and responsibilities

Senior QA Engineer

Job Description — Draft for Recruiter Use

Working Hours: Overlap with EST required

Reports To: Head of R&D

About the Role

We are hiring our first dedicated Senior QA Engineer to own end-to-end quality across three mature products, spanning hosted, on-premises, and legacy desktop environments. Today, testing is informal and SME-driven with only scattered unit test coverage — this is a hands-on, high-ownership role for someone who can define how QA is done here, not just execute an existing process.

Responsibilities

Test Strategy & Quality Ownership

• Own end-to-end quality for three mature products spanning hosted, on-premises, and legacy desktop environments — you are the final authority on what “ready to release” means.

• Design, implement, and continuously evolve a comprehensive test strategy that balances manual and automated testing, prioritizing based on risk, product maturity, customer impact, and release cadence.

• Build the QA function from the ground up: today, testing is informal and SME-driven with only scattered unit test coverage. You will define how testing should be done here, not just execute an existing process.

Hands-On Testing & Automation

• Personally design, execute, and maintain test plans and test cases across functional, regression, integration, and exploratory testing.

• Incorporate non-functional testing — performance and security — into the strategy where it matters most for the product and how it's used.

• Manage test environments and test data across hosted, on-premises, and legacy contexts to keep testing reliable and repeatable.

• Own the defect lifecycle: log, triage, prioritize, and track defects to resolution, and verify fixes before release.

• Build the initial automated testing capability where none exists today — selecting tools/frameworks, establishing patterns, and deciding what's worth automating vs. testing manually.

• Perform hands-on testing yourself; this is not a role that only plans and delegates.

Quality Documentation & Reporting

• Own internal quality documentation: test plans, test cases, test reports, test evidence, and Release Readiness / Go-No-Go reports.

• Produce customer-facing QA documentation — including test evidence for releases and custom feature requests — clear and presentable enough to share directly with customers.

• Maintain traceability between requirements, test coverage, and defects, with an eye toward audit-friendly, reproducible evidence — customers and stakeholders may need to see clearly what was tested, how, and why.

Metrics & Continuous Improvement

• Define and track quality metrics and KPIs (e.g., defect escape rate, test coverage, regression pass rate, release quality trends) and use them to drive decisions, not just report status.

• Identify recurring failure patterns and proactively propose process or product changes to prevent them.

Product & Cross-Functional Expertise

• Work closely with Product SMEs and Developers to build deep, first-hand expertise in all three products — how they work, how customers actually use them, and where the real risk lies.

• Review requirements and designs early with Product and Engineering to flag testability gaps and risk areas before development begins.

• Proactively seek out the people and information you need rather than waiting to be pointed in the right direction; you'll have close support from the Head of R&D but are expected to drive your own investigation.

AI-Augmented QA Practice

• Apply AI tools (the team currently uses Claude and Cursor) across the QA lifecycle — test case generation, exploratory test ideation, automation scripting, and documentation — to work faster without sacrificing rigor.

• Bring informed judgment about where AI genuinely accelerates quality work and where it doesn't.

Ways of Working

• Operate independently in ambiguous, shifting-priority conditions; escalate and ask for input, but don't wait for direction on things you're equipped to decide.

• Participate in and help shape Agile ceremonies (stand-ups, sprint planning, retrospectives) as they're formalized across product teams.

• Communicate clearly and professionally with technical and non-technical stakeholders — able to explain problems, plans, and trade-offs concisely, and to take feedback and incorporate it without friction.

• Overlap with EST working hours.

What You'll Bring

• 5+ years of QA experience, including experience shaping QA strategy/process, not just executing test cases (final number pending recruiter input on local market)

• Proven experience testing hosted/cloud and on-premises applications

• Experience with non-functional testing (performance, security)

• Comfortable working in compliance-aware or audit-sensitive testing contexts (data integrity, traceability, reproducible evidence)

• Hands-on experience with Jira, Xray, Confluence, and Playwright, plus API testing tools (e.g., Postman, Insomnia)

• Practical experience using AI tools (Claude, Cursor, or similar) as part of the testing workflow

• Excellent written and verbal English

• Strong communicator, comfortable working with ambiguity and shifting priorities

• Self-directed, proactive, “get it done” mindset