Founding QA Engineer - Build Quality from Day One
Context & Mission
Lefty is scaling fast, and we’re investing in engineering quality to match. We’re hiring our first dedicated QA engineer, a founding role in the Tech team.
As AI makes writing code faster and cheaper, quality control becomes the real bottleneck and differentiator — QA is more critical to product success than ever, not less.
Your mission: build the QA function from the ground up, in sequence:
Month one is strategy: define testing guidelines for the team and design the automated-testing plan.
Months two to six: stand up E2E coverage on the highest-risk user flows and put the release checklist in place.
After that: extend coverage to API-level tests and hand routine functional testing back to the engineers, so your time goes to automation and risk.
You’ll work across multiple engineering squads , not just one team, to embed quality practices product-wide.
About the position
Define the test strategy first: In your first month, set testing guidelines for engineers and design the automated-testing roadmap, what to automate, what stays manual, and in what order.
Own functional testing & UAT: Define the functional test plan for each new feature, run the critical cycles yourself and delegate the rest to the engineers who built the feature. Coordinate User Acceptance Testing with stakeholders before major releases.
Own the release checklist: Define the pre-deploy checklist and the post-deploy smoke test, and run them before every production deploy. You flag risks to the engineering lead, who makes the final ship decision. Your recommendation is documented on every release.
Build automated test coverage: Stand up E2E/integration suites starting with the highest-value flows, and wire gRPC/API-level tests for backend services.
Mentor on testability: Help engineers write more testable code and grow unit test coverage.
Partner across squads: Work with multiple dev squads across the product, not a single fixed team, adapting testing priorities to each squad’s roadmap.
Our stack
Backend: Java (Hibernate → MariaDB), 50+ gRPC services, Elasticsearch for search/analytics
Frontend: Angular, communicating over gRPC-Web (via Envoy), Storybook, Playwright, Vitest
Build & CI: Bazel monorepo, NX monorepo, GitLab CI