QA Lead - Build Quality Engineering Function from Scratch

Persona is where the world’s best companies and the world’s best talent meet.

We place exceptional people from 98 countries into full-time, long-term remote roles with the most ambitious companies on earth. Fortune 500 enterprises, fast-growing startups backed by Sequoia, Founders Fund, and Andreessen Horowitz, and high-performing companies of every size in between. Project management, operations, finance, design, marketing, customer success, and more. One person, one dedicated client, built to last.

The bar is the highest in the industry. More than 200,000 people apply every month, and fewer than 1 in 2,000 are accepted. If you make it, you join a network of people who have cleared a standard most companies couldn’t recruit for on their own, and you get the kind of role that’s almost impossible to find on your own: industry-leading pay set against your experience and skill, real career growth, and a stable seat at a serious company, working from home, anywhere in the world.

Persona was founded in 2018 by two Stanford graduates on a simple idea: talent is everywhere, but the systems that connect talent to opportunity are broken. We’re rebuilding them, and we’ve grown into one of the fastest-growing companies in the global talent industry doing it.

We hire people who care about the craft of their work, take ownership without being asked, and want to build a career rather than just hold a job. If that’s you, we’d like to meet you.

Role Summary

We are hiring a QA Lead to design and build a quality engineering function from scratch inside a small, technically deep engineering team. The work is hands-on and embedded: you will pair with engineers across multiple product teams, build the testing frameworks and CI tooling they actually use, and shape the standards that define what "production-ready" means. This is a builder's role, not a gatekeeper's — you will earn trust by contributing code, surfacing real bugs, and making it easier for every engineer to ship reliable software, rather than by issuing policies and waiting for compliance. Ideal candidates are senior engineers who chose to specialize in quality and thrive in environments where the playbook does not exist yet.

Key Responsibilities

Quality Strategy & Roadmap

• Own the delivery of engineering's quarterly quality goals, ensuring consistent, high-impact delivery while effectively managing resources
• Assess each product team's codebase for current test coverage, highest-risk surfaces, and production-readiness gaps; produce a prioritized testing roadmap engineers can execute against
• Establish and socialize quality policies, minimum quality gates, and production-readiness standards collaboratively and iteratively with product teams

Embedded Engineering & Mentorship

• Spend regular time inside each team's workflow: pair on test design for complex features, review PRs for test quality, and make testing collaborative rather than imposed
• Establish testing patterns for a multi-language stack; implement frameworks that make writing tests as easy as writing features
• Champion high-quality software delivery through hands-on technical leadership: individual development contributions, code reviews, and mentorship

CI/CD & Open-Source Contribution Infrastructure

• Build and own what runs inside the CI/CD pipeline quality gates (test suites, linting rules, reporting) in partnership with the Platform Lead
• Build automated PR checks and contributor CI gates to prepare for open-source contribution quality management
• Create technical documentation and processes that support high velocity and knowledge transfer across a distributed team

Required Qualifications

• 5+ years of professional software engineering experience, demonstrating the ability to operate as an engineering peer within squads — not just as a testing specialist
• Python proficiency required; TypeScript and Go strongly preferred to ensure cross-team codebase understanding and the ability to contribute beyond test suites
• Has integrated testing frameworks from zero in at least two ecosystems
• Has defined quality standards and production-readiness criteria for an engineering organization
• Fluency integrating CI/CD quality gates into engineering workflows to encourage adoption and sustained use
• Has introduced testing culture to one or more teams, establishing capabilities and best practices
• Located within ET ±1 hour to enable rapid team-oriented communication and engagement with a globally distributed engineering team
• Fully fluent in English
• Ability to commit long-term and full-time

Preferred Qualifications

• Prior experience at an early-stage startup or research-to-product organization
• Contributions to open-source projects, including standards for contributor testing and CI
• Experience working on distributed systems, privacy-preserving computation, or ML/AI infrastructure
• Familiarity with property-based testing, fuzzing, contract testing, or chaos engineering
• Experience with security testing, SAST/DAST tooling, or threat-model-driven QA
• Background in nonprofit, academic, or research-driven engineering organizations

Tools & Technologies

• Python (pytest, unittest, hypothesis), TypeScript (Jest, Vitest, Playwright), Go (built-in testing, testify), GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, or comparable CI/CD; Docker, linters (ruff, black, eslint), coverage tools (coverage.py, codecov), property-based testing libraries; load and performance testing tools (a plus); security scanning tools (a plus); Slack, Notion, Linear or Jira

Core Competencies

• Engineer-first mindset who specialized in quality
• Hands-on contributor who earns credibility through code, not policy
• Strong systems thinker; identifies highest-risk surfaces quickly
• Skilled at teaching through doing, not through mandates
• Comfortable in messy, early-stage environments where quality function is being built from scratch
• Strong collaborator across distributed, mission-driven engineering teams
• Bias to action with disciplined follow-through
• Energized by making an entire organization better at shipping reliable software

What We Offer

• Best salaries in the industry
• Work from anywhere permanently
• Opportunities for growth and advancement
• A fast-paced and collaborative environment
• A warm, people-first company culture
• Get paid in your currency of choice
• Full benefits

This is a full-time, long-term role, dedicated exclusively to one of our clients. All roles at Persona are 100% work-from-anywhere. Once hired, we will carefully match you to a client company that best suits your career background, skills, and goals.