Lead Software Test Engineer Full Time

Location: Hybrid / Kochi Salary: ₹60,000 – ₹1,00,000 / month

Reports to: CEO (Founder’s Office)

Team: Core Engineering — embedded across web, PWA, and mobile

The Mission

We ship fast. We ship across a SaaS web platform, progressive web apps, and React Native mobile apps — often all in the same sprint. Speed is our advantage, but speed without quality is just a faster way to lose trust.

That’s where you come in.

This is the person who owns the question “Is it actually good enough to ship?” Not as a gatekeeper who slows everyone down, but as the engineer who breaks things before users do. You are not joining an existing QA machine to push tickets through it — you are building the QA discipline from the ground up and setting the bar the whole team is measured against.

If you’ve ever watched a release go out and thought “I would have caught that,” this role is for you.

Your Role

You own quality end-to-end across the product portfolio. You define how we test, you build the systems that let us test at speed, and you hold the line on what ships.

• Own the Test Strategy: Define the testing approach for each product surface — web app, PWA, and mobile. You decide what gets automated, what stays manual, and what the regression coverage actually needs to be. This is yours to architect, not inherit.
• Automate Ruthlessly: Build and maintain automated test suites (E2E, integration, regression) so the team isn’t re-testing the same flows by hand every release. Think Playwright / Cypress for web, Appium / Detox for mobile — whatever fits the stack and scales.
• API & Integration Testing: Our products live and die on APIs and third-party integrations (payments, messaging, auth). You test contracts, edge cases, and failure modes — not just the happy path. REST and GraphQL should be second nature.
• Mobile & Cross-Platform: Test across real devices, OS versions, and screen sizes. Catch the icon that doesn’t render, the deep link that breaks, the crash on sign-out before it hits a user’s phone.
• Quality Gates in CI/CD: Embed automated checks into the deployment pipeline so quality is enforced by the system, not by someone remembering to test. A broken build should never reach staging quietly.
• Bug Triage & Release Sign-off: You run the triage. You write clear, reproducible bug reports developers don’t have to chase you about. And when it’s time to ship, your sign-off means something.
• Mentor & Set the Standard: As we grow the QA function, you’ll bring in and level up others. The testing culture of this company will look like whatever you build it to look like.

Who You Are

• 4–7 years in QA / SDET, with real exposure to owning or leading a testing effort — not just executing someone else’s test plan.
• Automation-first by instinct. You’d rather spend two days writing a suite than two weeks clicking through the same flows. You’ve shipped automated test frameworks that other people actually relied on.
• Comfortable across web and mobile. You’ve tested SaaS web apps, and you’ve tested native or cross-platform mobile (React Native / Flutter / native). You know the failure modes are different and you treat them differently.
• API-literate. You can read an API spec, write tests against it, and reason about what happens when a downstream service times out or returns garbage.
• A startup operator. You’re comfortable with ambiguity, missing documentation, and shipping in motion. You build the process the company needs, not the process your last job had.
• A clear communicator. Your bug reports are reproducible. Your sign-offs are trusted. Engineers don’t dread your comments — they rely on them.

Non-Negotiable Requirement

AI-Native Workflow. This isn’t a nice-to-have — it’s how we work. You’re expected to use AI to multiply your testing output: generating and maintaining test cases, drafting automation scripts, and standing up agentic test flows that explore the product the way a user would, at a scale no manual tester could match. We’re building toward QA that runs continuously, not just before release. You should be excited to lead that, not learning it on the job.

Proficiency with AI-assisted environments (Cursor, Claude, or equivalent) for writing and maintaining test code is assumed.

Bonus Points

• Hands-on familiarity with our stack: Django / Python backends, React front-ends, React Native (Expo) mobile, GCP (Cloud Run), and Supabase.
• Experience testing PWAs and offline-capable apps.
• Performance and security testing chops.
• Experience integrating test automation into GCP / AWS / cloud-native CI/CD.