Lead Quality Engineer Position

Position Overview

We are seeking a highly skilled and motivated Lead Quality Engineer to take full ownership of our quality assurance efforts. This is a high-impact, ground-floor opportunity to define, build, and scale our Quality Assurance (QA) function from scratch.

You will leverage both a strong QA mindset and deep technical expertise to establish a repeatable and scalable QA process. As a core member of the delivery team, you will ensure our products meet the highest standards of reliability, performance, and user experience.

At Discovery Machine® Inc., we are revolutionizing the future of technology with our pioneering Artificial Intelligence (AI) solutions. We scale cutting edge AI applications throughout the Department of Defense (DoD) and offer a small, tight-knit team environment where you are encouraged to grow and innovate.

Key Responsibilities

• Design, implement, and own an organization-wide, scalable QA framework, upholding quality as a proactive, first-line of defense.
• Define and institutionalize best practices for bug identification, prevention, and resolution, reinforcing QA beyond basic peer review.
• Define, plan, and run a comprehensive User Acceptance Testing (UAT) cycle every release/sprint.
• Partner with Product and Engineering to write detailed QA plans before development begins, ensuring full coverage of business and technical requirements.
• Perform hands-on QA using a risk-based approach, leveraging manual, exploratory, and automated testing techniques.
• Create, execute, and maintain automated test scripts (primarily for React UIs) with deep experience required in Playwright.
• Maintain and evolve automated testing frameworks to support growing product needs and team capacity.
• Decompose product requirements into comprehensive test cases to ensure coverage of business and technical needs.
• Write and execute SQL queries to validate data integrity and troubleshoot backend issues.
• Conduct code review analysis.
• Identify, track, document, and triage bugs, collaborating with Engineering to determine severity and prioritization for efficient resolution.
• Work within a Scrum/Agile team, sharing QA best practices and mentoring teammates to improve testing strategies.
• Make informed decisions on what, when, and how to automate, balancing efficiency with development speed and aligning with CI/CD pipelines.

Required Qualifications

• Must be a U.S. Citizen; Work Visa is not eligible.
• 5+ years of experience as a Quality Engineer.
• 3+ years of experience leading a team.
• Proven success in owning or building QA processes from scratch, particularly within small or mid-sized technology companies.
• Deep experience with automated testing frameworks.
• Experience debugging applications, analyzing logs, and using developer tools to investigate issues.
• Ability to write and optimize SQL queries for testing and troubleshooting purposes.
• Strong proficiency with GitHub and familiarity with modern development workflows and version control (e.g., Git).
• A strong QA mindset with the ability to clearly articulate test findings, risks, and recommendations.
• Strong understanding of Agile methodologies and familiarity with ticketing systems.