QA Test Lead

Job Title: QA Test Lead 
Experience 8+ Years
Location – Dallas, TX (100% Onsite)

Must Have Technical/Functional Skills

The QE Test Lead is responsible for leading quality engineering and testing activities across projects, with a strong focus on defect triage management, issue resolution, and cross- functional coordination. This role serves as a central point of contact for quality-related issues, ensuring defects are accurately documented, prioritized, assigned, tracked, and resolved in a timely manner.

The ideal candidate is an effective communicator and issue manager who can collaborate closely with development, product, business, DevOps, and support teams to drive quality outcomes and delivery readiness.

Roles & Responsibilities

Key Skills and Competencies

·Defect Triage Management: Ability to assess issue severity, business impact, priority, ownership, and release risk.

·Issue Management: Strong ability to drive issues to closure, remove blockers, manage dependencies, and ensure accountability.

·Communication: Excellent written, verbal, and presentation skills, with the ability to communicate effectively across technical and business teams.

·Stakeholder Management: Ability to build collaborative relationships and manage competing priorities across teams.

·Leadership: Ability to guide QE team members, influence cross-functional partners, and promote quality ownership.

·Attention to Detail: Strong focus on accuracy, documentation, traceability, and quality standards.

·Problem Solving: Ability to investigate complex issues, identify root causes, and facilitate practical solutions.

Quality Engineering & Test Leadership

·Lead and coordinate end-to-end testing activities across multiple releases, applications, or workstreams.

·Define test strategies, plans, scope, schedules, entry/exit criteria, and quality metrics.

·Guide QE team members in test design, execution, automation, regression testing, and test reporting.

·Ensure appropriate test coverage for functional, integration, regression, usability, and non-functional requirements.

·Identify quality risks early and recommend mitigation plans to project stakeholders.

Defect Triage & Issue Management

·Own and facilitate regular defect triage meetings with business, product, development, and QE teams.

·Review, validate, prioritize, and classify defects based on business impact, severity, urgency, and release risk.

·Ensure defects are assigned to the appropriate owners and have clear reproduction steps, evidence, and acceptance criteria.

·Track defects through their complete lifecycle—from identification and triage through resolution, retesting, and closure.

·Escalate high-severity, aging, blocked, or release-impacting defects to the appropriate stakeholders.

·Monitor defect trends, root causes, reopen rates, and resolution turnaround times; communicate actionable insights.

·Drive root-cause analysis and preventative actions for recurring or critical production and pre-production issues.

Cross-Functional Collaboration

·Act as an issue manager and liaison among QE, engineering, product, business analysts, project/program management, DevOps, and production support teams.

·Coordinate dependency resolutio n and ensure teams are aligned on ownership, timelines, and next steps.

·Communicate testing progress, defect status, risks, blockers, and release readiness clearly to technical and non-technical audiences.

·Participate in Agile ceremonies, release planning, backlog refinement, sprint planning, demos, and retrospectives.

·Partner with stakeholders to establish clear quality expectations and ensure timely decision-making on defects and release risks.