Lead QA Engineer

About Us

Lantern is a private markets data intelligence platform backed by the Aztec Group, Europe’s largest fund and corporate services provider.

We’re moving swiftly to market with an innovative solution for private market GPs. To support our plans, we're seeking a Lead QA Engineer who can help shape quality across our product and engineering teams. If you're driven by modern testing practices, Continuous Delivery, and raising the quality bar through collaboration, this role could be an excellent fit.

About You

As a Lead QA Engineer, you’ll join a team focused on powering Private Market data intelligence and insights. You’ll work closely with Engineering, Product, and Design, and report to the Head of Engineering. Your influence will stretch beyond testing—your role is to help the entire team adopt habits and techniques that enable reliable, frequent releases.

You have a track record of transforming QA from a reactive “final checkpoint” into a proactive, embedded discipline. You’re comfortable pairing with developers, participating in discovery sessions, shaping acceptance criteria, and guiding the team toward shared ownership of quality.

Key Responsibilities

Elevate Quality Across the Product Lifecycle

• Participate in early discovery and story kickoffs with Product, Design, and Engineering to build shared understanding and clarify acceptance criteria.
• Translate real usage examples into executable test scenarios that inform both automated and exploratory testing.

Improve Testing Practices in a Continuous Delivery Environment

• Guide the cross-functional team in pushing automated testing closer to development through unit, integration, and acceptance tests.
• Work with developers to ensure the CI/CD pipeline is the definitive source of truth for release readiness.
• Collaborate on designing features for testability, reducing the cost and complexity of validating changes.

Lead the Testing of User Stories Through Collaboration

• Take the lead in shaping how user stories are tested across the cross-functional team, ensuring expectations are clear and quality criteria are grounded in real examples.
• Encourage a workflow where QA guides testing practices, but engineers and product contribute actively to story-level validation.
• Work with engineers and product to perform the first round of manual testing together, treating this as a collaborative activity rather than a handoff.
• Help cross-functional teams recognise when a story is ready for release by aligning on acceptance criteria, test outcomes, and risk considerations.

Lead End-to-End and Data Testing Strategy

End-to-End Testing

• Own the approach to E2E testing, ensuring tests are meaningful, maintainable, and aligned with how users interact with the product.
• Collaborate with engineers and product to design and implement E2E test cases that reflect real workflows and acceptance criteria.
• Guide the team on when E2E tests are appropriate versus when other layers of testing provide better value.

Data Testing

• Build a deep understanding of the data Lantern ingests, transforms, and serves to clients.
• Define a strategy for validating data accuracy, integrity, and consistency across the core data model, microservices, and the user-facing applications.
• Introduce checks and automated tests that detect data anomalies early and continuously.
• Work with engineering, client success and product to ensure data-related acceptance criteria are explicit, testable, and tied to business expectations.
• Participate in investigations of data issues, helping cross-functional teams identify root causes and strengthen safeguards.

Lead and Mentor

• Line-manage members of the QA team, including regular 1:1s, performance conversations, and personal development support.
• Coach engineers on quality-focused development methods (e.g., TDD, small-batch changes, pairing).
• Promote habits that reduce defects early, including running tests locally, pairing during tricky implementations, and using structured exploratory sessions.
• Provide guidance to less experienced team members, helping them internalize high-quality engineering practices.

Drive Exploratory and User-Centric Testing

• Conduct lightweight exploratory sessions on stable slices of functionality, focusing on UX expectations, error paths, and overall feel.
• Communicate issues directly and quickly, prioritizing conversation over ceremony unless the severity demands formal reporting.

Requirements

• Demonstrable experience in QA or Software Engineering roles with significant exposure to modern testing practices.
• Experience working within cross-functional teams practicing Continuous Delivery.
• Strong background in automated testing across multiple layers (unit, integration, API, acceptance).
• Demonstrated ability to collaborate closely with developers, product managers, and designers.
• Comfortable participating in or reviewing code-related changes and understanding testing implications.
• Excellent communication skills and the ability to build trust through partnership.
• Skilled in structured exploratory testing and designing tests from user-centered perspectives.
• Familiarity with Python and JavaScript/TypeScript ecosystems is highly beneficial.
• Knowledge of microservice architectures, API testing, and cloud-native environments.
• Experience leading QA initiatives, coaching others, and shaping team-wide quality culture.

Bonus

• Experience in private markets, financial technology, or data intelligence products.
• Hands-on experience with Kubernetes-based environments.

Our Tech Stack

• Python microservices architecture
• React and Next.js for micro-frontends
• Kubernetes