About the role:
The Lead Quality Engineer - Test Strategy & Design is responsible for the design, structure, and continuous quality of Safetrust's test cases and test documentation across mobile, web, API, and device platforms. This position plays a key role in the QA organization, acting as the source of truth for what is tested, how it is described, and how a release is proven ready to ship.
This role focuses on test design leadership and documentation ownership, working as a peer to the Test Automation Lead (who owns frameworks and CI infrastructure), and contributes to Safetrust's continued growth by ensuring test coverage scales rigorously as the product grows.
Key Responsibilities:
Test Case Design Ownership
- Own the end-to-end test case design strategy across mobile apps, web portals, APIs, and IoT devices.
- Define and enforce standards for how test cases are written: structure, granularity, preconditions, expected results, traceability to requirements.
- Review and approve test cases authored by QA engineers; coach the team on test design techniques (boundary, equivalence partitioning, decision tables, state transition, risk-based, exploratory charters).
- Maintain a master test case library — organized, deduplicated, version-controlled, and tagged for reuse across releases and product lines.
- Drive coverage analysis: map test cases to requirements, user stories, and risk areas; identify gaps and prioritize remediation.
- Define and maintain reusable test data sets, environments, and fixtures that test cases depend on.
- Establish enterprise-wide quality standards, testing methodologies, and governance across all Safetrust engineering teams.
- Partner with Engineering, Product Management, Security, and Customer Success to ensure quality objectives are incorporated throughout the software development lifecycle.
- Define release quality gates, risk acceptance criteria, and go/no-go recommendations for production deployments.
- Develop and maintain quality dashboards measuring defect trends, release readiness, customer-reported issues, automation coverage, and engineering quality metrics.
- Lead root cause analysis initiatives for significant production incidents and establish preventative quality improvements.
- Drive continuous improvement initiatives focused on quality engineering maturity, process optimization, and organizational scalability.
- Develop onboarding programs, mentoring frameworks, and technical training for Quality Engineers across all disciplines.
- Collaborate with the QA Automation Lead to define enterprise automation priorities and maximize automation return on investment.
Test Documentation Ownership
- Own the structure and quality of all test documentation: test plans, test strategies, test reports, release sign-off documents, RCA reports, and regression suites.
- Establish templates, naming conventions, and lifecycle rules for every test artefact across the QA team.
- Maintain the test management system (Zephyr, or equivalent) as the single source of truth — keep it clean, current, and queryable.
- Produce clear, actionable release-readiness reports for engineering and product leadership: what was tested, what was skipped, known issues, residual risk.
- Maintain audit-ready documentation for security, compliance, and customer reviews (SOC 2, ISO 27001 evidence, customer test reports).
- Document and continuously improve QA processes, runbooks, and onboarding material so the team scales without losing rigor.
Team Leadership
- Lead and mentor a team of QA engineers spanning manual, mobile, device, and automation testing.
- Set quality KPIs (coverage, defect leakage, escape rate, test cycle time) and report them to engineering leadership.
- Plan QA capacity per release; balance manual, exploratory, and automated effort across squads.
- Plan hiring, growth, and individual development for the QA team.
Automation as Supporting Capability
- Decide which test cases are worth automating and which stay manual or exploratory — guide the team in making the right call.
- Set standards for how automated tests are written, named, and tied back to the test case library.
- Ensure automation results feed back into the same test management and reporting flow as manual results — one coherent picture of quality.
Skills & Experience:
- Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field.
- 7+ years of QA experience with 2+ years leading a QA team or owning a QA function.
- Deep expertise in test design techniques and demonstrable ownership of large test case libraries (1,000+ cases).
- Hands-on experience with test management tools (TestRail, Zephyr, Xray, qTest, or similar) — including admin-level configuration.
- Strong skills in writing clear, structured technical documentation in English.
- Solid grasp of risk-based testing, traceability matrices, and release-readiness criteria.
- Experience defining QA processes, templates, and standards across multiple product lines or squads.
- Excellent leadership, communication, and stakeholder-management skills.
- Working knowledge of at least one automation framework (Selenium/Cypress/Playwright/Appium) — enough to set standards and review work, not necessarily to build the framework yourself.
Nice to Have / Preferred
- Experience testing IoT, embedded, or access-control products end-to-end.
- Familiarity with BLE/NFC, mobile credentials, or hardware-software integration testing.
- Exposure to compliance-driven QA (SOC 2, ISO 27001, medical, automotive, or financial standards).
- ISTQB Advanced Level (Test Manager) or equivalent certification.
- Programming literacy (Python, Java, or JavaScript) to read and review automation code.
Success Profile:
The ideal candidate is:
- Rigorous and structured, with a strong eye for test coverage gaps and documentation quality.
- A strong people leader who coaches QA engineers on test design craft.
- Able to