Come work at a place where innovation and teamwork come together to support the most exciting missions in the world!
Qualys is looking for a Lead QA Engineer to own quality for a platform that ingests assets, findings, and risk signals from dozens of third-party security vendors ore — and normalizes them into a single risk model used by thousands of enterprise customers.
You will lead a team of QA and automation engineers, define the test strategy across UI, backend, and data pipelines, and drive our move toward AI-assisted, self-healing automation. This is a hands-on leadership role: you set direction, make release-quality calls, and still write and review framework code. Candidates who have built or meaningfully enhanced AI-based self-healing automation tools will stand out.
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Responsibilities
QA Leadership & Strategy
- Lead, mentor, and grow a team of 4–8 QA and automation engineers; run hiring, goal-setting, code reviews, and career development.
- Define and own the end-to-end test strategy for connector and platform releases — test planning, risk assessment, coverage targets, and entry/exit criteria.
- Act as the quality voice in sprint planning, design reviews, and release readiness; make clear go/no-go recommendations backed by data.
- Establish QA processes that scale: defect triage, severity/priority standards, regression tiers, test case management, and root-cause analysis for escaped defects.
- Track and report quality metrics — defect leakage, automation coverage, flaky-test rate, mean time to detect, release cycle time — to engineering and product leadership.
- Partner closely with development, product, support, and sustenance teams to shift quality left and reduce customer-reported issues.
Test Automation (Hands-On)
- Architect and evolve automation frameworks across React/TypeScript front ends, Java/Spring Boot microservices, REST/GraphQL APIs, and Kafka-based pipelines.
- Build resilient UI automation with Playwright or Selenium 4, including parallel execution and reliable test data management.
- Own API and contract testing (REST Assured, Pact, Postman/Newman) covering OAuth2, JWT, token, and Basic auth flows, pagination, throttling, and vendor error handling.
- Validate data end-to-end: ingestion → normalization → PostgreSQL persistence → aggregation → UI, including schema and migration regression.
- Build mock vendor APIs and record-replay harnesses so connector tests run without live third-party credentials.
- Own CI/CD quality gates in Jenkins or GitHub Actions with fast PR-level feedback and tiered regression runs.
AI-Driven & Self-Healing Automation
- Lead the design and rollout of self-healing automation: automatic locator recovery, DOM-similarity scoring, element fingerprinting, and confidence-based fallback that keeps suites green through UI changes.
- Apply LLMs across the QA lifecycle — generating test cases from requirements and API specs, converting manual tests to automated scripts, summarizing failures, and suggesting root causes from logs.
- Build intelligent flaky-test detection, failure classification, and auto-quarantine to separate real regressions from environmental noise.
- Introduce risk-based and change-impact test selection so CI runs the tests most relevant to each change.
- Evaluate AI testing tools (Healenium, Applitools, mabl, Testim, or in-house builds) and decide build-vs-buy based on accuracy, cost, and maintainability.
- Set guardrails for AI use in QA — validating AI-generated tests, measuring healing accuracy, and preventing false passes.
Qualifications
Experience
- 5–8 years in QA / test engineering, with at least 2 years leading or mentoring a QA team.
- Track record of building automation frameworks from scratch and owning release quality for a SaaS product.
- Hands-on experience building, extending, or productionizing an **AI-based or self-healing automation** solution — and the ability to explain how you measured its impact.
Skills
**Automation & Testing**
- Playwright and/or Selenium 4; TestNG or JUnit 5; Cypress, Jest, or Vitest
- API automation: REST Assured, Postman/Newman, GraphQL testing, schema validation
- Contract testing (Pact), service virtualization, and mocking (WireMock or similar)
- Performance testing with JMeter, k6, or Gatling
- Visual regression and accessibility testing
**Programming & Backend**
- Strong **Java** (17+) and **JavaScript/TypeScript**; Python is a plus
- SQL and data validation on PostgreSQL or similar
- Familiarity with microservices, Spring Boot, and Kafka or other event streaming systems
**AI & Machine Learning in QA**
- Self-healing locator strategies and ML-based element matching
- LLM integration: prompt design, structured outputs, and embedding model calls into test tooling
- AI-assisted test generation, failure clustering, and log/trace summarization
- Familiarity with RAG or vector search over test artifacts is a plus
- Working knowledge of AI testing platforms (Healenium, Applitools, mabl, Testim)
**DevOps & Tooling**
- CI/CD with Jenkins or GitHub Actions
- Docker and Kubernetes fundamentals
- Test management (Jira/Xray, TestRail, or Zephyr)
- Observability tools (Grafana, Prometheus, ELK) for test and pipeline diagnostics
**Leadership**
- Test strategy and planning for complex, multi-component releases
- People leadership: hiring, mentoring, performance feedback
- Clear communication with engineering, product, and leadership stakeholders
- Data-driven decision-making on quality and release readiness
Preferred
- Background in cybersecurity — vulnerability management, CSPM, EDR, SIEM, or identity.
- Experience testing multi-tenant SaaS at large data volumes.
- ISTQB Advanced / Test Manager certification.
- Open-source contributions to testing or automation projects.
Skills Required
- 5–8 years of QA or test engineering experience
- At least 2 years leading or mentoring a QA team
- Experience building automation frameworks from scratch
- Experience owning release quality for a SaaS product
- Production experience building, extending, or deploying an AI-based or self-healing automation solution
- Playwright and/or Selenium 4
- TestNG or JUnit 5
- Cypress, Jest, or Vitest
- REST Assured, Postman/Newman, GraphQL testing, and schema validation
- Contract testing, service virtualization, and mocking
- Performance testing with JMeter, k6, or Gatling
- Visual regression and accessibility testing
- Strong Java 17+ and JavaScript/TypeScript skills
- SQL and PostgreSQL or similar data validation
- Familiarity with microservices, Spring Boot, and Kafka or other event streaming systems
- Self-healing locator strategies and ML-based element matching
- LLM integration, prompt design, structured outputs, and embedding model calls
- AI-assisted test generation, failure clustering, and log or trace summarization
- CI/CD with Jenkins or GitHub Actions
- Docker and Kubernetes fundamentals
- Test management using Jira/Xray, TestRail, or Zephyr
- Grafana, Prometheus, or ELK for diagnostics
- Python
- RAG or vector search over test artifacts
- Working knowledge of Healenium, Applitools, mabl, or Testim
- Cybersecurity product testing background
- Multi-tenant SaaS testing at large data volumes
- ISTQB Advanced or Test Manager certification
- Open-source contributions to testing or automation projects
Qualys Compensation & Benefits Highlights
The following summarizes recurring compensation and benefits themes identified from responses generated by popular LLMs to common candidate questions about Qualys and has not been reviewed or approved by Qualys.
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Affordable Benefits — Benefits costs are widely viewed as low for employees and dependents, with healthcare often described as almost fully paid for. Feedback suggests this affordability helps offset perceptions of lower base pay in some roles.
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Healthcare Strength — Healthcare offerings are broad, including multiple medical plan options, dental and vision coverage, mental health support, and disability insurance. Benefits are described as “pretty amazing” or “great,” reinforcing perceived quality and coverage depth.
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Equity Value & Accessibility — Equity participation is accessible through company stock plans and an employee stock purchase plan. Compensation packages commonly include equity alongside salary and bonus, which some consider a meaningful part of total rewards.
Qualys Insights
What We Do
Qualys, Inc. (NASDAQ: QLYS) is a pioneer and leading provider of disruptive cloud-based security, compliance and IT solutions with more than 10,000 subscription customers worldwide, including a majority of the Forbes Global 100 and Fortune 100. Qualys helps organizations streamline and automate their security and compliance solutions onto a single platform for greater agility, better business outcomes, and substantial cost savings. The Qualys Cloud Platform leverages a single agent to continuously deliver critical security intelligence while enabling enterprises to automate the full spectrum of vulnerability detection, compliance, and protection for IT systems, workloads and web applications across on premises, endpoints, servers, public and private clouds, containers, and mobile devices. Founded in 1999 as one of the first SaaS security companies, Qualys has strategic partnerships and seamlessly integrates its vulnerability management capabilities into security offerings from cloud service providers, including Amazon Web Services, the Google Cloud Platform and Microsoft Azure, along with a number of leading managed service providers and global consulting organizations. For more information, please visit http://www.qualys.com
