Lead QA Engineer

About the role:

Join a product engineering organization where Playwright is the standard for E2E and API automation and AI-assisted QA is part of everyday work. As Lead QA Engineer, you hold the top individual contributor level for QA: you stay hands-on, tackle the hardest quality problems, and set the bar for automation and responsible AI use in testing. You shape automation patterns and quality standards - not as a separate job title, but as the senior IC who makes good practices stick. You influence tools and quality practices as a technical advisor; broader strategy and technology choices are made with architects and engineering leadership - you recommend, you don’t decide alone. This is not a people-management role - impact comes through expertise, mentoring, and shared standards, not line management. If you want top-tier IC work, deep Playwright craft, and visibility across squads in a remote-first setup, this role is for you.

What you'll do:

• Build and refactor critical Playwright automation (UI and API) and evolve shared patterns, standards, and quality gates across squads.
• Act as the primary technical escalation for unstable suites, CI bottlenecks, test data and environment issues, and critical-path regressions.
• Define and improve test data and environment patterns (isolation, parallelism, fixtures) so automation scales reliably in CI/CD.
• Advise on API, component-level, and E2E test strategy - layering, coverage, and what to automate - in collaboration with architects and engineering leads.
• Mentor QA engineers on Playwright, CI, and AI-assisted workflows (prompting, review, safe use of tools); champion reusable approaches team-wide.
• Work with DevOps and developers on shift-left testing, pipeline reliability, and maintainable test environments (Docker, modern CI/CD).
• Communicate quality trade-offs and risks to product and engineering leadership.

What you'll need:

• 7+ years in QA/test engineering with a track record of evolving Playwright automation on large, long-lived SaaS products.
• Proven hands-on skills with Playwright (UI and API) and JavaScript/TypeScript and/or Python.
• Advanced daily use of AI-assisted development for test design, failure analysis, and coaching others; sound judgment on when human verification is required.
• Ability to diagnose and fix systemic quality issues (parallelism, test data, flakiness, pipeline design).
• Strong CI/CD experience running and improving automated suites and working with Docker in cloud-hosted delivery.
• Experience defining automation architecture and quality standards (framework patterns, gates, layering) used beyond a single squad.
• Excellent English and credibility with developers, architects, and leadership on risk and priorities.

What we offer:

• Equity - Every Appfire team member is eligible for company equity, fostering a true sense of ownership and connection to our growth
• Paid time off - 25 paid days off regardless of your years of tenure. Increases to 30 days of annual leave per year after 5 years of employment
• 24 hours of paid volunteer time to engage in meaningful activities outside of work
• Training and personal development - Grow with Appfire University — our custom, on-demand learning platform designed to support your continuous development
• Health insurance - Private health insurance through UNIQA, fully paid by the company
• Multisport Card - The card is fully covered by Appfire
• Transport Card - Sofia City Transport Card, fully paid by Appfire, providing access to all modes of public transportation within the city
• Food vouchers - Pre-paid Pluxee lunch card with a monthly budget of 102,26 EURO
• Baby Bonus - To celebrate new additions to the family, employees receive a one-time net bonus of 511 EURO upon the birth of a child
• Volunteering - 3 fully paid days each year to participate in Appfire Town, our Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) program supporting local communities
• Flexibility - The role is fully remote within Bulgaria, with the option to work from our Sofia office.

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