Staff Quality Engineer - India

About the role:

As a Staff / Principal Quality Engineer (Pillar Lead) on our Engineering team in India, you will serve as the primary quality coordinator and strategic anchor for one of our core product pillars. You will not just test software; you will act as an "Internal Product Manager for Quality." You will work closely with Engineering Directors and Product Managers to align quality initiatives with Pillar OKRs, ensure developers share accountability for automation, and guide the overarching test strategy for your domain. This role is designed for a highly experienced technical authority and proactive risk mitigator who thrives on driving cross-module alignment, adopting cutting-edge AI testing solutions, and ensuring every release meets the highest standards of enterprise excellence.

What you’ll be doing:

• Serve as the local expert and ultimate technical authority for your Pillar's test processes, feature interactions, and quality standards.

• Engage early in the SDLC, contributing significantly to refinement, planning meetings, and RFC/Design reviews. Challenge Product Managers and Engineering Leads to consider testability, competitive edge, and integration risks before a single line of code is written.

• Review and influence Pillar OKRs (e.g., engineering velocity, reliability) to identify partnership opportunities where QE tactics directly drive business objectives.

• Take accountability for the quality of your Pillar by proactively identifying weak spots, automation blockers, and resource gaps, and aggressively escalating these to leadership to request support.

• Represent your Pillar in the Cross-Module Leadership Team to coordinate cross-team impacts, share industry-leading practices, and align on standardized test plans and tooling across all pillars.

• Architect and lead non-functional testing strategies across the pillar, explicitly championing performance, load, and scale testing to ensure the platform reliably handles enterprise-level concurrency and data volumes.

• Drive AI Adoption & Standardization: Champion the use of AI in the testing lifecycle. Collaborate with the Internal Tools (Autobots) team to contribute to, adopt, and standardize common AI-based testing solutions across your pillar (e.g., leveraging AI for test script generation, intelligent failure triage, and pipeline optimization).

• Champion the philosophy that quality is a shared engineering goal, ensuring development teams are equally accountable for automation maintenance and preventing the anti-pattern of "throwing it over the wall to QA."

• Intelligently allocate QE efforts within your Pillar, prioritizing high-value user journeys and guiding your team to swarm on the most critical initiatives.

• Contribute test code, audit Developer Unit/Integration tests for coverage gaps, and actively write complex End-to-End (E2E) automation scripts alongside your team.

• Establish and enforce best practices for unit and functional testing frameworks to ensure comprehensive component and flow validation.

• Develop and execute strategies to consistently augment unit, functional, and acceptance test coverage across the pillar, tying coverage goals directly to release quality gates.

• Partner closely with your Pillar’s dedicated Automation Enablement engineer to ensure framework gaps are closed and flaky tests are managed urgently.

• Act as a strong mentor and teacher of nuanced testing principles to both Feature QEs and Developers, empowering others to do the work while continuing to deliver impact yourself.

We’re looking for:

• 8-12+ years of experience in Quality Engineering, Software Development in Test, or a related field, with a proven track record of leading quality initiatives across multiple teams.

• Deep expertise in multiple technical disciplines, programming languages (Python, Pytest, Playwright and Typescript preferred), test tools, and automation frameworks.

• Proven experience defining and executing performance, scale, and load testing strategies for complex distributed systems.

• Demonstrated ability to evaluate "build vs. buy" decisions and develop entirely new implementations of industry solutions.

• Strong strategic problem-solving perspective, with the ability to balance release risk vs. schedule to maximize test execution without sacrificing the speed of delivery.

• High EQ and emotional maturity; an active listener who accepts feedback willingly, seeks opposing points of view, and prioritizes the best solution over being right.

• Proactive and humble ownership, with a focus on raising the visibility of your team's work, sharing credit, and asking for help when facing insurmountable risks.

• Excellent communication and influence skills, capable of representing the engineering organization internally and externally.

• A collaborative, team-oriented mindset with the ability to unblock teams and coordinate actions across the organization.

Bonus Points:

• Practical experience leveraging Generative AI or LLMs in the software testing lifecycle, or actively contributing to AI-driven test frameworks and internal AI tooling.

• Deep domain expertise in areas relevant to the Pillar.

• Experience driving large-scale organizational transformations or shifts in quality methodologies.

• Prior experience in dynamic, fast-paced startup environments.

• Experience with API and web app UI test automation tools like Gherkin, Cypress, or similar.

• Experience deploying, installing, and configuring applications on cloud-based servers (AWS experience is a plus).