Lead QA Engineer

Lead QA Engineer

What we do

At Truckbase, we empower small and mid-sized specialized trucking companies with easy-to-use online tools to help them thrive. Legacy trucking software was built and priced for large fleets and not customized to specialized carriers. Truckbase was founded in 2021 with the vision that purpose-built solutions can meaningfully improve the livelihoods of drivers, dispatchers, operations managers, and owners at small trucking companies.

Role

Truckbase is looking for a Lead QA Engineer who is passionate about delivering flawless product experiences to our users. You’ll be the primary champion of software quality—stepping into complex customer workflows, identifying edge cases early, and serving as the final sign-off before code reaches production. Your work directly dictates the reliability of our application and how much our customers trust our product every single day.

You’ll spend your time balancing hands-on product testing with code-level automation. You’ll partner closely with Engineers and Product Managers to map out critical paths, execute functional test scenarios, and build fast, reliable E2E regression suites using TypeScript and Playwright. You’ll integrate these tests into our CI/CD pipelines to lay the groundwork for continuous deployment, while using modern AI tools (like Claude Code, Copilot, and Cursor) to accelerate how you write and maintain tests. While this isn’t a direct people-management role (initially), you will completely own our quality strategy, test framework architecture, and release readiness.

This role and level will be commensurate with years of relevant prior experience.

Strong candidates have 5+ years of QA experience in a fast-paced B2B SaaS or startup environment, with demonstrated expertise in TypeScript, Playwright, and CI/CD pipelines. Exceptional product intuition, high attention to UX detail, and a relentless commitment to quality matter just as much as technical execution.

Key Responsibilities

1. Product Quality & Customer Advocate

• Develop product and business sense on user goals and workflows for dispatchers, truck drivers, and trucking company owners. Learn from Product team and customers in order to conduct thoughtful exploratory testing
  
• Act as the ultimate champion for the end user, defining quality standards, bug severity metrics, and sign-off criteria for feature releases.
  
• Learn our product inside and out. Partner with Product Managers to review feature specs, identify edge cases early, and map out critical customer paths.
  
• Author comprehensive test plans, perform hands-on exploratory testing, and validate high-stakes user journeys before code hits production.

2. TypeScript & Playwright Automation

• Design, write, and maintain reliable end-to-end (E2E) and API automated test suites using TypeScript and Playwright.
  
• Rapidly convert critical manual test cases into parallelized, fast-running automated regression suites to dramatically shorten deployment cycles.
  
• Monitor and debug test failures, maintaining high confidence in our automated test suites.

3. CI/CD & Release Management

• Co-own release cadence and deployment gates. Coordinate release readiness across engineering, product, and customer support.
  
• Embed Playwright test suites directly into our CI/CD pipelines (e.g., GitHub Actions) so tests run on every pull request and staging build.
  
• Establish automated quality gates (smoke tests, sanity runs, PR checks) to help transition our deployment pipeline toward safe, high-confidence continuous deployment.

4. AI Tooling & Workflow Optimization

• Actively use modern AI tools (e.g., Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, Cursor, Playwright Codegen/MCP) to generate test scripts, write mock data, and refactor test suites quickly.
  
• Use AI workflows to parse test logs, diagnose flakiness, and generate edge-case scenarios based on customer bug reports.
  
• Continuously experiment with AI-driven QA utilities to keep our lean startup engineering team operating at maximum speed.

Qualifications & Requirements

Must-Haves:

• 5+ years of hands-on Quality Assurance / Quality Engineering experience in a fast-paced software startup or high-growth tech company.
  
• Strong TypeScript Proficiency: Comfortable writing clean, maintainable TypeScript code for automation frameworks and API validation.
  
• Hands-on Playwright Experience: Practical, real-world experience building or maintaining E2E test suites with Playwright.
  
• Release Management Experience: Experience driving release readiness, managing deployment go/no-go decisions, and triaging production defects.
  
• CI/CD Pipeline Experience: Practical experience running test suites inside CI/CD tools (e.g., GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, CircleCI).
  
• AI Tooling Adoption: Experience incorporating AI development tools (GitHub Copilot, Claude Code, ChatGPT) into daily testing workflows.
  
• Customer-Centric Mindset: Passion for user experience, attention to subtle product UX bugs, and strong functional test case design skills.

Nice-to-Haves:

• Experience working in early-stage startups where scope changes quickly and adaptability is key.
  
• Familiarity with API testing tools (Postman, Bruno, native HTTP clients in TypeScript) and basic SQL querying.
  
• Experience setting up feature flags (e.g., LaunchDarkly) or canary releases for gradual rollouts.