Lead, Software Quality Assurance- Contract-to-Hire

Lirio is a technology/software company that provides expertise in a variety of behavioral science domains (e.g., behavioral economics, social psychology, public health), data science, and machine learning to drive consumer engagement, close gaps in preventive and chronic care, and promote health and well-being across an individual’s lifespan. Lirio’s behavior change AI platform unites behavioral science with advanced artificial intelligence (AI) to deliver Precision Nudging health interventions. Precision Nudging is the application of behavioral science to health interventions personalized by AI to each individual that overcome barriers to action at the right time and place for scalable, behavior change. 

This is a remote role with the opportunity to be hybrid if located in Tennessee. All applicants must be authorized to work in the US without sponsorship.

To ensure an excellent onboarding experience and integration into the company, new colleagues will spend their first week onsite at one of our offices in Tennessee. Travel expenses will be paid. This is a requirement. 

This is a contract-to-hire role. The contract period is 3-6 months with conversion dependent on performance.

Position Summary 

The Software QA Lead Engineer is accountable for quality strategy and execution across Lirio’s cloud-native platform, user interfaces, and customer integrations. This role leads a shift-left quality approach across squads (Platform, Enterprise, Data/ML, etc.), owning test strategy, automation, and quality gates for web/UI experiences, services, APIs, event-driven workflows, and data flows in a regulated healthcare environment. 
 
This role involves mentoring QA engineers, designing and implementing test automation frameworks, and conducting code and test reviews, while partnering closely with Engineering, Product, Cloud/SRE, and Customer Operations to ensure releases are reliable, observable, and audit-ready. 

Essential Duties & Responsibilities 

Quality Assurance Leadership (50%) 

• Lead the design, implementation, and execution of comprehensive test strategy across APIs, services, event-driven workflows (Kafka), and UI surfaces.
• Own and evolve automated test coverage (unit, integration, contract, end-to-end) and maintain a risk-based manual test strategy where automation is not practical.
• Ensure test coverage for functional, regression, integration, performance, and reliability testing (timeouts, retries, idempotency, failure modes).
• Advocate for quality engineering practices (TDD where appropriate, CI quality gates, code review standards, and testability in design).
• Define and maintain quality gates in CI/CD (e.g., minimum coverage thresholds, contract test pass, critical path E2E pass, vulnerability scan pass where applicable).
• Partner with Cloud/SRE to validate release readiness via observability (logging, metrics, tracing) and operational dashboards
• Embed quality and testability considerations into feature and system design by reviewing application logic, APIs, data models, event contracts, and UI workflows in partnership with engineers.
• Establish and enforce standards for automation quality, including flakiness reduction, stabilization practices, clear ownership, and expectations for timely remediation of broken or unreliable tests.
• Define and document QA processes and best practices. 

Product Owner & Development Support (10%) 

• Collaborate with product owners and developers to clarify requirements and acceptance criteria.
• Participate in backlog refinement and sprint planning to ensure testability of features.
• Facilitate agile ceremonies as needed. 

Mentorship & Subject Matter Expertise (25%) 

• Build and maintain shared QA practices, documentation, and knowledge-sharing mechanisms (playbooks, training, cross-coverage) to avoid single points of failure across squads and releases. 
• Standardize testing approaches for event-driven systems, including message schema validation, backward compatibility, replay scenarios, idempotency, ordering assumptions, and failure handling (Kafka and similar messaging technologies). 

Continuous Learning & Innovation (10%) 

• Stay current with industry trends, tools, and technologies in software testing.
• Promote continuous improvement and innovation within the QA team.
• Evaluate and adopt tooling that improves cycle time (local test environments, ephemeral environments, test data management). 

Production Support & Issue Resolution (5%) 

• Support production releases, participate in incident triage, and drive root cause analysis with Engineering, SRE/Cloud, and Customer Operations.
• Track defect escape trends and drive corrective actions (test additions, gating changes, process improvements).
• Triage and resolve defects, collaborating with development and support teams. 

Qualifications 

• 5-7 years of related experience
• Bachelor's degree in related field
• Experienced with test automation for APIs/services (e.g., JUnit/TestNG for JVM services, PyTest for Python services)
• UI automation experience (e.g., Cypress or Playwright, Jasmine) where applicable
• Performance testing (e.g., Gatling, k6, JMeter)  and contract testing (e.g., Pact or equivalent) experience
• Observability tooling familiarity (Datadog/OpenTelemetry concepts) 
• Familiarity with CI/CD tools and processes 
• Experience with version control (e.g., Git)
• Cloud platforms (e.g., AWS, Azure)
• Scripting and programming languages (e.g., Java, TypeScript, Groovy, Python)  
• Agile methodologies (e.g., Scrum, XP, SAFe)
• Experience with Databases/SQL, Kafka, and Kubernetes 
• Leadership and coaching skills  
• Ability to operate in ambiguity and improve systems iteratively (not waiting for perfect process)
• Strong judgment around risk-based testing and release decisions
• Strong organizational and time management skills  
• Excellent communication and collaboration abilities  
• Adaptability and problem-solving skills  
• Ability to translate complex technical concepts for non-technical stakeholders 

Benefits (Eligible after Initial Contract Period)

• Medical (HSA available) 
• Dental 
• Vision 
• Short-term & long-term disability (company-paid) 
• Life & AD&D (company-paid) 
• 401K with company match 
• 10 paid holidays, quarterly company closure dates, + holiday week company closure 
• Flexible time off policy 
• Work from home
• 6 weeks paid parental leave
• Salary range: $130k-$150k