Head of QA – Product Quality

This is a fully remote position, open to applicants in India.

📋 Description

• Take ownership of the product-level quality strategy and the implementation roadmap for Happy Color.

• Establish release-readiness criteria and deliver independent assessments of product quality.

• Oversee acceptance testing for the entire product.

• Validate cross-domain workflows involving mobile clients, backend services, analytics, advertising, consent, payments, and other integrations.

• Identify systemic product risks that cannot be detected within a single engineering domain.

• Guide the transition from primarily manual testing to a balanced Quality Engineering model.

• Develop end-to-end (E2E) and regression automation for critical product scenarios.

• Implement quality gates within CI/CD pipelines.

• Enhance test environments, test data, reporting, and automation stability.

• Introduce risk-based testing, shift-left practices, and AI-assisted QA tools as appropriate.

• Build and lead the Product Quality team responsible for product acceptance, critical regression, E2E testing, user experience validation, and automation efforts.

• Recruit, develop, and mentor manual QA, automation, and SDET engineers.

• Coordinate quality functions across Backend QA, Client QA, and additional QA teams.

• Establish unified quality standards, metrics, and audit practices across QA teams.

• Conduct quality reviews and identify gaps in domain-level testing.

• Serve as the technical owner of QA standards or support an assigned Quality Engineering Technical Lead.

• Define and track quality indicators, including escaped defects, regression coverage, automation stability, flaky-test rates, regression duration, release-blocking defects, system-boundary defects, and production/support trends.

• Utilize analytics, support cases, incidents, and production signals to pinpoint additional coverage needs.

• Communicate product-quality risks and improvement progress to engineering and product leadership.

• Establish the Product Quality function, define team interactions, introduce product acceptance criteria, identify critical scenarios, create an automation roadmap, and enhance CI quality gates and regression speed.

⛳️ Requirements

• Over 5 years of experience in QA or Quality Engineering.

• More than 3 years in a QA leadership or Quality Engineering leadership position.

• Strong product mindset with the ability to recognize user, business, and systemic risks.

• Demonstrated experience in transforming manual testing into a quality function driven by engineering principles.

• Experience in building or significantly enhancing E2E and regression automation.

• Solid understanding of test automation architecture, CI/CD integration, test environments, and quality gates.

• Ability to evaluate automation strategies, framework architecture, code quality, and engineering practices.

• Experience in testing high-scale mobile applications or games.

• Comprehensive knowledge of mobile application testing; backend and API testing; distributed and cross-system scenarios; Firebase analytics validation; databases and SQL-based platforms; advertising and attribution systems such as Adjust or AppsFlyer; and release and production quality management.

• Experience with Android Studio, Xcode, Charles Proxy or similar tools, API clients, and mobile automation frameworks.

• Strong leadership qualities and the ability to influence teams within a matrix structure.

• Capability to make challenging quality decisions and clearly articulate product risks.

• Fluent in Russian.

• Proficient in English at an intermediate level or higher.

• Nice to Have: Experience with ad-driven mobile products; monetization, consent, GDPR/CCPA, payments, or analytics; building SDET or automation teams; applying AI tools to testing; and working with incident, support, and production data.

🏝️ Benefits

• Competitive salary and benefits package.

• Flexible working hours.

• Options for remote or office work.

• Opportunities for career growth and professional development.

• A fun and inclusive company culture that celebrates diversity and creativity.

• The chance to work with a talented and passionate team in a creative and dynamic environment.