QA Engineer Lead

About the Role

We're looking for a hands-on QA Engineering Lead to shape and scale Sardine’s end-to-end quality function - spanning automation, manual testing, frameworks, and strategy. You’ll lead a growing team of QA engineers while also contributing technically to ensure our products are robust, scalable, and reliable. This is a 70% IC and 30% management role.

This high-impact, cross-functional role involves close collaboration with Product, Sales, and Engineering. This role is ideally suited for someone who thrives in a high-ownership environment, is motivated to build scalable systems, and wants to shape the quality function from the ground up.

What you’ll be doing

70% IC Scope + 30% Manager

• Own and evolve the QA function across our products, including test framework, test automation, manual QA practices, and continuous integration 
• Build a robust, scalable, and maintainable automated test framework for backend APIs and frontend applications
• Develop test plans, cases, and data strategies for complex features across distributed systems.
• Partner with engineers to shift testing left and embed quality into the dev lifecycle
• Partner with DevOps and Engineering to embed quality gates into our CI/CD and release pipelines
• Establish and track quality KPIs such as defect density, regression rates, and test coverage.
• Promote a culture of quality and champion QA best practices across the organization.
  Lead and mentor QA engineers while contributing hands-on to test development.
  

What you’ll bring

• 6+ years of experience in QA or software engineering roles with a strong testing focus, ideally in high-growth startup environments
• 2+ years of formal management or team lead experience, including mentoring QA engineers
• Experience working with distributed or international teams
• Expertise in building end-to-end test automation for APIs, web frontend and mobile SDKs
• Proficiency with modern test frameworks (e.g., Cypress, Selenium, Playwright)
• Comfort writing tests in languages like Python, JavaScript, or TypeScript
• Solid understanding of CI/CD workflows and how to integrate automated tests
• Strong communicator with a bias toward action, ownership, and continuous improvement