Founding QA Lead

About the role

We are looking for an experienced, hands-on QA leader to become our first dedicated QA hire. You will take ownership of quality assurance across our Ruby on Rails web application and native iOS application built with Swift, while establishing the testing practices, automation and quality culture the company needs to scale.

Today, the CEO/Product Manager and engineering team perform a meaningful share of application testing and release validation. During your first month, you will learn the products and critical workflows, document key knowledge and lead a structured transition of routine QA responsibility. This is a builder role: you will test and investigate issues personally before growing and leading a QA team.

Why this role matters

You will reduce founder dependency, improve release confidence and create a practical, repeatable quality discipline across Product and Engineering. You will have the opportunity to shape the QA strategy, tooling, automation approach and future team from the beginning.
What you'll do

• Assess the current quality posture of our Rails web application, Swift iOS application, APIs, integrations, test environments and release process.
• Create and execute a first-month knowledge-transfer plan with the CEO/Product Manager and Engineering, then progressively assume routine QA and release-validation responsibilities.
• Define a risk-based testing strategy covering exploratory, functional, regression, API, integration, mobile, cross-browser/device and release testing.
• Evaluate existing automation and build reliable automated test suites for high-value web, API and mobile workflows, selecting the right test layer and framework for each risk.
• Address unreliable or flaky tests and integrate maintainable automated quality checks into CI/CD workflows.
• Balance automation with effective exploratory and manual testing; clearly explain what should not be automated and why.
• Establish regression coverage, release-readiness criteria, defect triage and root-cause practices; improve test data, environments, observability and reproducibility with Engineering.
• Bring quality into product discovery, planning and implementation so risks are identified earlier.
• Define the future QA team structure and help hire, onboard, mentor and lead additional QA professionals as the company grows.

What we're looking for

• Substantial professional software QA experience, including recent hands-on ownership in a QA Lead, Test Lead, QA Engineering Manager, SDET Lead or comparable role.
• Evidence of building or materially improving a QA function, testing strategy and release process in an environment that needed greater structure.
• Strong experience testing complex web applications and meaningful experience testing mobile applications.
• Hands-on experience designing and maintaining web, API and/or mobile test automation, with sound judgment about test layers, reliability, speed and maintenance cost.
• Ability to investigate failures across browser or mobile clients, HTTP/APIs, logs, data and integrations and communicate useful findings to engineers.
• Working knowledge of CI/CD, test environments, test-data management, Git and modern software delivery practices.
• Experience interviewing or hiring QA professionals, plus experience mentoring or managing people.
• Clear communication, pragmatic judgment and willingness to remain hands-on while building the function.

Preferred qualifications

• Experience as the first or early QA hire in a growing software company.
• Experience testing Ruby on Rails applications or comparable server-side web systems.
• Experience testing native iOS/Swift applications and mobile lifecycle, device, network or synchronization behavior.
• Experience with relevant automation tools such as Playwright, Cypress, Selenium, Appium or XCUITest, plus SQL, API testing and observability tools.

Team and collaboration

You will work closely with the CEO/Product Manager, Product and Engineering. QA will provide strategy, visibility and disciplined testing, while quality remains a shared responsibility across the company.