lefty.io is an influencer marketing platform that empowers brands to optimize their strategy and automate their workflows. We help brands and agencies run top-performing influencer programs end-to-end: from talent discovery & qualification, to relationship management, automated campaign reporting, performance measurement, and competitive benchmarking.
The world’s most prestigious Luxury and Lifestyle brands trust Lefty. We partner with Chanel, Dior, H&M, Sephora, and many more, helping them maximize their influencer insights and elevate audience brand experiences worldwide.
We’re growing fast in a booming market that keeps reinventing itself. Our goal? Triple our revenue and our Product & Tech teams in the next 5 years. That means plenty of room to grow, learn, and make your mark.
On the product side, the challenges are as exciting as they are complex: AI-driven data at scale, multi-interface user journeys, third-party integrations, collaborative workflows, and payment systems. If you love solving tough problems and shaping elegant experiences, Lefty is the place to do it.
CONTEXT
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.
MISSION
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 monore
PROFILE
5+ years in QA, including experience building a QA function from scratch.
Technical skills
Strong manual/exploratory testing and bug reporting discipline.
Hands-on with an E2E framework (Playwright, Cypress).
API testing experience; comfortable with gRPC tooling or able to ramp quickly.
Comfortable reading frontend (Angular) and backend (Java) code to reason about root cause.
Experience wiring automated tests into CI/CD (GitLab CI) so they gate releases.
Soft skills & mindset
Zero-to-one builder: comfortable with no existing clear process.
Pragmatic prioritizer: picks highest-risk flows to test first.
Direct communicator: raises quality risks clearly and early, with evidence.
Fluent English, spoken and written: Lefty's Product & Tech team is highly international; English is the working language across teams.
Nice to have
Interest in using AI/LLMs to scale test generation and coverage.
Experience testing SaaS products with third-party API integrations.
Performance/load testing exposure.
INTERVIEW PROCESS
HR Call | 30 mins
Technical Interview (CTO & VP) | 60 mins
Take-Home Case Study
Case Presentation & Interview (CPO) | 60 mins
We welcome international candidates already holding a valid French work visa. Please note that we are not able to provide visa sponsorship at this stage.
Skills Required
- 5+ years of experience in QA
- Experience building a QA function from scratch
- Strong manual and exploratory testing skills
- Strong bug reporting discipline
- Hands-on experience with an end-to-end testing framework such as Playwright or Cypress
- API testing experience
- Comfort with gRPC tooling or ability to ramp up quickly
- Ability to read Angular frontend and Java backend code to determine root cause
- Experience integrating automated tests into CI/CD, including GitLab CI, to gate releases
- Fluent spoken and written English
- Interest in using AI or LLMs for test generation and coverage
- Experience testing SaaS products with third-party API integrations
- Performance or load testing experience
What We Do
The Independents is a global marketing, design, and communications group serving leaders across the luxury and lifestyle sectors. It brings together specialized creative partners and combines innovation, culture, technology, and collaborative expertise to develop results-driven solutions for ambitious brands. Its capabilities span brand experience, strategy, design, production, and communications, helping clients build distinctive identities and connect more effectively with audiences worldwide.
