QA Engineering Manager - Lead Gen Team

About HighLevel: HighLevel is an AI powered, all-in-one white-label sales & marketing platform that empowers agencies, entrepreneurs, and businesses to elevate their digital presence and drive growth. We are proud to support a global and growing community of over 2 million businesses, comprised of agencies, consultants, and businesses of all sizes and industries. HighLevel empowers users  with all the tools needed to capture, nurture, and close new leads into repeat customers. As of mid 2025, HighLevel processes over 4 billion API hits and handles more than 2.5 billion message events every day. Our platform manages over 470 terabytes of data distributed across five databases, operates with a network of over 250 microservices, and supports over 1 million hostnames. Our People With over 1,500 team members across 15+ countries, we operate in a global, remote-first environment. We are building more than software; we are building a global community rooted in creativity, collaboration, and impact. We take pride in cultivating a culture where innovation thrives, ideas are celebrated, and people come first, no matter where they call home. Our Impact As of mid 2025, our platform powers over 1.5 billion messages, helps generate over 200 million leads, and facilitates over 20 million conversations for the more than 2 million businesses we serve each month. Behind those numbers are real people growing their companies, connecting with customers, and making their mark - and we get to help make that happen. Role Overview: We are seeking a highly experienced Engineering Manager – SDET to lead Quality Engineering across multiple SaaS products, including Email Builder, Social Planner, Onboarding, and Email AI. This role will manage an initial team of five engineers with a clear mandate to scale the organization to double its size over time. The ideal candidate brings deep technical expertise in SaaS CRM platforms, particularly sales and marketing products, and demonstrates strong leadership in driving automation-first, test-driven, and shift-left quality strategies at scale. Responsibilities:

Quality Strategy and Technical Leadership:

Define and execute the overall Quality Engineering vision, strategy, and roadmap aligned with organizational goals

Design, implement, and evolve advanced test strategies, automation frameworks, and quality best practices for large-scale SaaS applications and Strong hands-on background as a Test Automation Architect, ideally in TypeScript and Playwright

Drive the adoption of an Automation-First approach by building robust automated test platforms and internal developer tooling that accelerate innovation and increase engineering velocity

Lead the transition toward Test-Driven Development (TDD) and shift-left testing practices integrated seamlessly within CI/CD pipelines

Product Ownership:

Own end-to-end quality for multiple products, including Email Builder, Social Planner, Onboarding, and Email AI, ensuring consistent quality standards across all offerings

Define and govern functional, regression, and exploratory testing strategies across microservices, APIs, SDKs, data layers, and user interfaces

Drive excellence in non-functional testing, including performance, scalability, reliability, failover, security, and cross-platform compatibility

People Management and Team Growth:

Lead, coach, and manage a growing team of Quality Engineers and SDETs, fostering a culture of technical excellence, ownership, and continuous improvement

Build and scale a multi-disciplinary QA organization covering automation, platform QA, data quality, and performance engineering

Mentor senior engineers and emerging technical leaders, enabling career growth and succession planning as the organization scales

Cross-Functional Collaboration:

Partner closely with Engineering and Architecture teams early in the design phase to influence system testability, architecture decisions, and quality outcomes.

Collaborate with Product Management to define release criteria, risk assessment frameworks, and go/no-go decisions for launches.

Work with Customer Support and Customer Success teams to identify real-world use cases, close quality gaps, and proactively address customer-impacting issues

Metrics, Visibility, and Accountability:

Establish and maintain clear, data-driven quality metrics, KPIs, and dashboards to provide real-time visibility into release readiness, product stability, and production health

Use quality data to drive accountability across teams and continuously improve SDLC effectiveness

Operational Excellence and Customer Impact:

Analyze production issues and customer escalations, drive root cause analysis, and implement preventive quality improvements to reduce recurrence

Ensure compliance with enterprise standards, SLAs, and customer expectations for mission-critical SaaS systems

Act as the final quality authority for major releases and customer-facing deployments

Represent Quality Engineering leadership in executive reviews, roadmap discussions, and critical customer engagements

Scaling and Continuous Improvement:

Act as a key technical leader in solving complex scaling challenges related to automation, infrastructure, and organizational growth

Continuously challenge the status quo by improving processes, tooling, and engineering practices to support rapid and sustainable company growth

Requirements:

A minimum of 8+ years of  experience in Software Quality Engineering, with at least 3 years in a people management or QA leadership role within a SaaS environment

Proven experience defining and implementing advanced test strategies, automation frameworks, and developer tooling in modern SaaS platforms

Strong and demonstrable understanding of SaaS CRM systems, particularly sales and marketing automation products

Deep knowledge of microservices-based architectures, cloud platforms such as GCP/AWS, and modern CI/CD pipelines

Hands-on experience integrating automated testing and TDD practices into continuous integration and continuous delivery workflows

Enthusiasm for leveraging GenAI and AI agents to enhance testing productivity, efficiency, and intelligence

Nice to Have:

Strong leadership with tech presence with the ability to influence senior stakeholders and drive alignment across engineering, product, and business teams

Excellent communication skills, with the ability to articulate quality risks, trade-offs, and recommendations to both technical and non-technical audiences.

A customer-first mindset with a passion for building reliable, scalable, and high-quality SaaS products