<div class="content-intro"><p><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif;">Arionkoder is an AI consulting firm helping companies build, embed, and own AI systems that drive real business outcomes. We combine Product Development, Artificial Intelligence, and Team Augmentation to craft digital products and solutions that create lasting impact — guided by a human-centric approach and a commitment to pushing the boundaries of what technology can do.</span></p></div><p>We are looking for a <strong>Quality Lead </strong>experienced in leading quality efforts - not only for their own testing output, but for the team achieving its quality objectives. This is a hands-on leadership role: you remain a practicing quality engineer, equally comfortable designing manual and exploratory test scenarios as writing and maintaining automated suites in CI, while also setting the quality direction, planning the work, and creating the conditions for others to do their best work.</p> <p>The QA Lead is the primary quality reference. You define the quality strategy for the products in scope, make or facilitate the key quality decisions, keep visibility over what everyone is working on, surface risks and blockers early, and ensure no significant quality risk stays invisible. You do not need to be the deepest expert in every tool or layer you understand how the pieces fit together and ensure the team's work follows a coherent quality vision.</p> <p>You bring an AI-first mindset to the craft - using AI tools to accelerate test design, automation, triage, and reporting, with the judgment to know when to trust the output and when not to - and you push that way of working into the team. You also own quality for LLM-powered features (assistants, RAG, agents, etc.) where “pass/fail” is a judgment you have to operationalize through evals: curated datasets, graded criteria, baselines, and regression thresholds.</p> <p>This is not a role for someone who waits for tickets to be marked "ready for QA", nor for someone who leads only from a spreadsheet. We need a lead who challenges unclear requirements, asks the uncomfortable questions early, coaches others to do the same, and treats production confidence as a team deliverable — measured in fewer surprises in production, faster releases, and a stronger quality culture across the teams you work with.</p> <p><strong>Key Responsibilities:</strong></p> <p><strong>Leadership and Team Accountability</strong><strong>:</strong></p> <ul> <li>Be accountable for the team achieving its quality objectives - providing direction and fostering ownership, not doing everything yourself.</li> <li>Maintain visibility into what each team member is working on, how they are approaching it, and where support is needed.</li> <li>Identify blockers, risks, and deviations early, and adjust the quality plan when circumstances change.</li> <li>Plan and distribute quality work across the team: scope, sequencing, ownership, and realistic effort estimates.</li> <li>Ensure quality decisions are made at the right level with the right people; delegate where possible and resolve issues when the team cannot reach a conclusion.</li> <li>Create an environment where team members participate in decisions, challenge ideas, take responsibility, and develop autonomy.</li> <li>Evaluate team members against the expectations of their role and seniority; provide actionable feedback and meaningful growth opportunities.</li> <li>Improve the team's quality practices, tools, processes, and ways of working by turning experience and feedback into practical changes.</li> </ul> <p><strong>Quality Strategy and Direction</strong></p> <ul> <li>Establish and communicate a coherent quality vision for the products in scope; ensure individual decisions and implementations fit together.</li> <li>Define test strategies based on product risk, release goals, and business impact - not generic checklists.</li> <li>Influence quality upstream by reviewing requirements and designs to surface ambiguity, edge cases, and testability issues early.</li> <li>Identify non-functional risks (performance, security, accessibility, data integrity) and ensure they are addressed or escalated with clear owners and mitigation plans.</li> <li>Define and maintain the team's quality standards: definition of done, bug hygiene, coverage expectations, documentation.</li> </ul> <p><strong>Manual QA and Exploratory Testing</strong></p> <ul> <li>Run and lead structured exploratory sessions guided by risk and user personas.</li> <li>Cover what automation can't yet: complex flows, visual checks, new feature shakedowns, third-party integrations.</li> <li>Document findings clearly: reproducible steps, environment, expected vs. actual, severity, impact - and hold the team to the same bar.</li> <li>Act as a user advocate during pre-release validation.</li> </ul> <p><strong>Test Case Design and Documentation</strong></p> <ul> <li>Design and review test cases covering happy paths, edge cases, negative scenarios, role/state transitions, integrations, and relevant non-functional risks.</li> <li>Maintain traceability to requirements, acceptance criteria, and product risks.</li> <li>Build and maintain smoke tests, regression suites, and release checklists as living, team-owned assets.</li> </ul> <p><strong>Automation QA</strong></p> <ul> <li>Guide the automation approach: framework, layers, structure, test data, re