Lead QA Engineer

About the role

At Appfire, we believe that great work happens when people get to choose how they work. After 20 years of creating software that empowers teams to break silos and collaborate seamlessly, we've learned that one size does not fit all. We’re a team of 800+ employees, working remotely across 28 countries. Our flagship products include: JXL, Comala Document Management, 7Pace Time Tracker, Jira Misc Workflow Extensions, and BigPicture.

Here you can read some of our customer stories: https://appfire.com/resources/resource-library/customer-stories

About the role:

Join a product engineering organization where Playwright is the standard for E2E and API automation and AI-assisted QA is part of everyday work. As Lead QA Engineer, you hold the top individual contributor level for QA: you stay hands-on, tackle the hardest quality problems, and set the bar for automation and responsible AI use in testing. You shape automation patterns and quality standards - not as a separate job title, but as the senior IC who makes good practices stick. You influence tools and quality practices as a technical advisor; broader strategy and technology choices are made with architects and engineering leadership - you recommend, you don’t decide alone. This is not a people-management role - impact comes through expertise, mentoring, and shared standards, not line management. If you want top-tier IC work, deep Playwright craft, and visibility across squads in a remote-first setup, this role is for you.

What you'll do:

- Build and refactor critical Playwright automation (UI and API) and evolve shared patterns, standards, and quality gates across squads.

- Act as the primary technical escalation for unstable suites, CI bottlenecks, test data and environment issues, and critical-path regressions.

- Define and improve test data and environment patterns (isolation, parallelism, fixtures) so automation scales reliably in CI/CD.

- Advise on API, component-level, and E2E test strategy - layering, coverage, and what to automate - in collaboration with architects and engineering leads.

- Mentor QA engineers on Playwright, CI, and AI-assisted workflows (prompting, review, safe use of tools); champion reusable approaches team-wide.

- Work with DevOps and developers on shift-left testing, pipeline reliability, and maintainable test environments (Docker, modern CI/CD).

- Communicate quality trade-offs and risks to product and engineering leadership.

What you'll need:

- 7+ years in QA/test engineering with a track record of evolving Playwright automation on large, long-lived SaaS products.

- Proven hands-on skills with Playwright (UI and API) and JavaScript/TypeScript and/or Python.

- Advanced daily use of AI-assisted development for test design, failure analysis, and coaching others; sound judgment on when human verification is required.

- Ability to diagnose and fix systemic quality issues (parallelism, test data, flakiness, pipeline design).