Quality Assurance Team Lead

QA Lead — SleekSkyAbout SleekSky

SleekSky builds and runs software for clients who want to scale their technology without heavy overhead: dedicated teams, a startup-inspired culture, and a bias for agility, ownership, and continuous improvement. We combine professional depth with real room to learn, decide, and build things that last.

The Role

Most QA Lead openings hand you a quality function to run. This one hands you the mandate to build it.

You'll own quality end to end for a live US healthcare platform that our dedicated team builds and operates: the strategy, the automation that enforces it, the release process it gates, and the QA team that runs all three. Today, quality here is careful manual judgement applied late in the cycle. Your job is to turn it into a system applied continuously, and then be answerable for the result.

This is a construction job for at least the first year, and a player-coach role throughout. If you're looking for an established department to manage, this isn't it. If you want to build one and then run it, few roles will hand you this much room.

What You'll Own

QA strategy, end to end. What gets tested, where automation pays, and what must be true before software moves between environments. You'll build the mechanism that enforces it, not just the document that describes it.

The automation estate. A suite already exists. Part of it encodes hard-won domain knowledge, and part of it is coverage on paper. A part-built migration to Playwright needs an owner who will finish it. Your first judgement call is telling those apart.

The release gate. A short, fast, trustworthy suite wired into CI/CD, running on triggers rather than on someone remembering, and fast enough that nobody wants to skip it.

Quality metrics. What escaped, where it should have been caught, and whether that's improving month over month. Making those questions answerable with data is part of the job.

Environments and test data. Regulated health data changes what may appear in a fixture, a log, or a test environment. Test accounts, seed data, and that discipline are yours.

The team. QA engineers report to you from day one, and you have the mandate to grow the function. You define what you're hiring for, and you hire it.

What Makes the Problem Interesting

A platform of a dozen-plus applications, several of them white-labelled. "The login test" is really a matrix of tests across customer configurations.

The most expensive defects aren't broken pages. They're a malformed field in a file delivered to a partner. Testing that is data validation, not clicking.

Asynchronous behaviour everywhere: background jobs, scheduled reminders, email, SMS, and automated voice calls. The thing you're asserting on often happens minutes later, in a system you don't control.

Real patients on the other end. There is no quiet maintenance window in which to be wrong.

What You'll Bring

5+ years in QA / quality engineering, with at least two of them spent setting the test agenda rather than executing someone else's.

An automation suite you built that ran without you, on a pipeline or a schedule, with other people depending on the result.

Test code engineers would accept in review. JavaScript/TypeScript is our stack and Playwright is our direction. Cypress or Selenium experience transfers.

CI/CD fluency: pipelines, gates, artifacts, and a real opinion about flaky tests.

SQL you can actually use. Much of what needs verifying here never appears on a screen, including scheduled jobs, generated files, and data extracts delivered to partners.

Depth in API and integration testing, and a method for deciding what not to test.

Experience mentoring or leading QA engineers, and clear written English. You'll write the strategy, the release call, and defect reports a developer can act on without a follow-up question.