Lead QA Automation Engineer

Lead QA Engineer

HealthCentral is a health experience company at the intersection of media, community, and culture. We translate clinical expertise into human understanding, pairing trusted medical insight with lived experience to create content, connections, and experiences that resonate in the real world.

We are looking for a Lead QA Automation Engineer to own and improve the quality assurance process across our web and mobile products, including our media websites and the Drops app.

This is a hands-on leadership role. You will be responsible for maintaining and improving our automated test infrastructure, expanding test coverage, managing manual QA efforts, and partnering with Engineering leadership to define a scalable QA process.

Our current automation stack includes Playwright, GitHub Actions, Testiny, and Sauce Labs. The existing automation pipeline was originally created by Engineering and is business-critical, but it needs dedicated QA ownership, maintenance, and improvement. Our QA team is currently small, with one manual QA tester, and we expect this role to help build the foundation for a growing QA function.

The ideal candidate is a hands-on QA automation engineer with enough experience to take ownership of both automation and process. They should be comfortable working directly in Playwright tests and CI pipelines, but also capable of managing manual QA execution, improving test planning, and partnering with Engineering leadership on release quality. This person should be technical, organized, pragmatic, and comfortable joining a small QA function where they will need to bring structure without adding unnecessary process.

Key Responsibilities

Test Automation Ownership

• Own, maintain, and improve automated testing pipelines for our media websites and mobile applications.
• Build, update, and maintain automated tests using Playwright or similar browser automation frameworks.
• Improve test reliability, reduce flaky tests, and optimize automated test execution time.
• Maintain and improve CI test workflows using GitHub Actions.
• Expand automated coverage for critical user flows, regression areas, and high-risk product functionality.
• Establish standards for how automated tests are written, reviewed, organized, and maintained.
• Work with Engineering to ensure applications are testable and automation-friendly.
• Investigate failed test runs, identify root causes, and coordinate fixes with Engineering when needed.

QA Process and Strategy

• Define and improve QA processes across web and mobile products.
• Collaborate with Engineering leads on release quality standards, defect triage, regression planning, and QA workflow.
• Determine the appropriate balance between automated testing, manual testing, exploratory testing, and smoke testing.
• Create practical QA guidelines for feature validation, regression testing, release readiness, and production verification.
• Improve visibility into product quality through test reporting, defect trends, and release risk communication.
• Help establish useful quality gates that improve confidence without unnecessarily slowing down delivery.

Manual QA Leadership

• Manage, support, and mentor the existing manual QA tester.
• Plan and coordinate manual QA work across active development, regression cycles, and releases.
• Ensure manual test cases are well organized, current, and mapped to meaningful product coverage.
• Use Testiny to manage test cases, test runs, QA documentation, and regression coverage.
• Help onboard and mentor additional QA team members as the team grows.
• Create a QA operating model that works for a small team now and can scale over time.

Cross-Functional Collaboration

• Work closely with Engineering, Product, Design, and other stakeholders to understand requirements, risks, and acceptance criteria.
• Participate in sprint planning, feature reviews, bug triage, and release planning.
• Communicate quality risks clearly and proactively.
• Help identify gaps in requirements, edge cases, and user experience issues before release.
• Advocate for quality while balancing speed, pragmatism, and business priorities.

Mobile, Device, and Cross-Browser Testing

• Support QA efforts for the Drops app and related mobile experiences.
• Use Sauce Labs or similar tools for cross-browser, cross-device, and mobile testing.
• Help define supported device, browser, and operating system coverage.
• Ensure critical experiences are validated across the environments most important to our users.