Quality Engineering Lead

Element451 is building the AI-powered platform reshaping how colleges and universities recruit, enroll, and support their students — and quality is how we earn the trust of the institutions that run on us. This is a rare chance to own and build a modern quality system end to end: set the strategy, build the team and infrastructure that deliver it, and lead how a high-performing engineering org bakes quality in across the full lifecycle. If you want to shape a discipline rather than inherit one — and you believe quality engineering is being reinvented by AI right now — you’ll feel at home here.

You’ll own quality engineering at Element451 — the strategy, the system, and the team that delivers it. This is a player-coach role: most of your time goes to leading — managing and growing a team of quality engineers, setting quality strategy across the full SDLC, and building the systems, tooling, and practices that make it real — and you stay hands-on in the testing itself, because you can’t curate a quality system you’ve stopped practicing.

Quality here is an enablement function, not a gate. Your team isn’t the bug-finder of last resort between engineering and release; you build the personas, journeys, infrastructure, agents, and signals that let every engineer hit a high bar themselves. It’s also an explicitly AI-forward role: we expect you to bring thought leadership on how agentic AI reshapes quality work and to operationalize it across your team.

You own the quality system across the full lifecycle — from refinement and design through automation, release, and production. Quality isn’t a phase you run before launch; it’s a property the whole org builds in, and you own the system that makes it possible. In practice, you:

• Set and own quality strategy across the full SDLC — shift-left into refinement and design, define release-quality signals, and lead production escape analysis.

• Lead, manage, and grow the quality engineering team — hire, coach, set standards, and develop QEs into force multipliers for the engineers they partner with.

• Build and curate the quality system — the persona and journey model, the end-to-end automation suite, the test observability layer (flake, escape, time-to-feedback, coverage), and the shared tooling developers rely on — as a living product your team delivers.

• Make quality measurable and legible — define the metrics that matter and the dashboards that surface them.

• Champion agentic AI across the practice — pilot and scale AI-assisted test generation and agent-based testing, own the evaluation discipline for our AI features, and set the human-in-the-loop governance that holds AI-assisted work to the same bar as anything written by hand.

• Stay hands-on — design and write tests on high-risk work, set patterns by example, and keep your technical depth current.

• Partner across Engineering and Product as the owner of the quality discipline — drive cross-cutting initiatives and represent quality in how the org plans and ships.

We hire for behavior as much as for experience. We’re looking for someone who:

• Lives our values, and builds team culture through behavior, not policy.

• Leads as a force multiplier — measures success by the org’s quality outcomes and the engineers the system makes better, not by the bugs they personally find.

• Is excellent by default, and holds the quality system to a higher standard than the minimum.

• Leads with service — treats developer enablement as core to the job.

• Puts the team and product first — partners with engineering and product rather than positioning quality as a separate gate.

• Communicates with clarity and honesty — surfaces signal and risk proactively.

• Treats feedback as a gift, and gives it to the team generously and well.

• 7+ years in quality engineering, including proven experience leading quality practices, teams, or processes in a complex, multi-tenant SaaS product.

• Experience managing and growing engineers — hiring, coaching, setting standards, and developing a team that delivers.

• Strong, current hands-on engineering skills — you write and review production-quality test code and build tooling. Quality engineering here is a building role, and the Lead is no exception.

• A track record owning a quality system across the full SDLC — persona- and journey-based E2E strategy, test observability, release quality, and shift-left practices.

• Practical depth with modern test automation; Playwright or comparable browser automation is highly relevant, and contract testing (Pact-style) is a plus.

• The ability to own quality for our AI features — prompt evaluation, golden datasets, hallucination and safety testing, output regression — and to stand that discipline up quickly. Direct experience is a strong plus; the requirement is the judgment and engineering ability to build it.

• Genuine thought leadership in agentic AI for quality — current, hands-on fluency with agentic tooling across the quality lifecycle, and a point of view on operationalizing and governing it. We’re a Cursor shop; Claude Code, Codex, or comparable tools are equally valued.

• Comfort with the quality-as-system-owner, enablement-not-gate framing. If your prior orgs treated QA as the gate, this role will feel different — and that difference is the point.

• Excellent written communication — strategy docs, playbooks, and standards that stand on their own.

• Impactful not Immediate - We prioritize and invest in initiatives that will be most impactful.

• Progress before Perfection - We are action-oriented people. We are empowered to make decisions and achieve our goals.

• Learners before Masters - We are curious and humble people who strive to constantly improve.

• Together not Alone - We rally behind each other and pitch in to support the greater whole.

• Customer Success not Support - We solve partner goals and prioritize their success.

Our process is rigorous and designed to be real signal — for you and for us. Expect live, interactive technical and leadership assessment with our engineers and leaders, not take-home busywork or trivia. You’ll show how you think about a quality system, how you lead a team, and how you apply and govern AI tooling in real time. We move quickly for the right people and give you a clear view of the bar before you accept.