Team Lead - Quality Assurance

## Job Summary

The QA Team Lead is responsible for leading Mercans' Quality Assurance function, ensuring the quality, reliability, and performance of global payroll and HR SaaS solutions. The role manages the QA team, defines testing strategies, drives automation and AI adoption, and collaborates with Product, Engineering, and DevOps teams to deliver high-quality software through continuous improvement and efficient QA processes.

### Key Responsibilities

**Team Leadership**

* Lead, mentor, and develop the QA team.
* Allocate resources, conduct performance reviews, and identify training needs.
* Foster collaboration, accountability, and continuous learning.
* Promote skills in automation, AI-driven testing, performance, and security testing.

**Quality Assurance**

* Define and execute QA strategies for payroll and HR applications.
* Oversee functional, regression, API, performance, security, and exploratory testing.
* Review test plans, cases, defect reports, and release readiness.
* Ensure quality checkpoints throughout the SDLC and improve defect management.

**Automation & AI**

* Drive UI and API test automation and CI/CD integration.
* Develop and optimize automation frameworks.
* Evaluate and implement AI/ML tools for test generation, defect prediction, self-healing automation, and analytics.
* Improve testing efficiency, coverage, and release quality through automation.

**Collaboration**

* Work closely with Product, Engineering, DevOps, Compliance, and Customer Support teams.
* Participate in Agile ceremonies and provide QA leadership throughout development.
* Communicate quality metrics, risks, and recommendations to stakeholders.

**Continuous Improvement**

* Define QA standards, KPIs, and reporting.
* Improve release processes, software quality, and testing methodologies.
* Ensure compliance with security and data protection standards.
* Lead root cause analysis and support continuous quality improvements.

### Skills & Qualifications

* Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or related field.
* 5+ years of QA experience, including leadership in Agile environments.
* Strong expertise in manual and automated testing.
* Hands-on experience with Selenium, Kotlin, TestNG, Maven, GitLab, UI/API automation, and CI/CD.
* Knowledge of performance, security, and AI-assisted testing.
* Excellent leadership, analytical, communication, and problem-solving skills.
* Experience with HR, Payroll, or Finance software is an advantage.

### Key Performance Goals

* Increase automated test coverage by **30%** and reduce manual test creation time by **25%** through AI-driven testing.
* Reduce QA release cycle time by **20%** while maintaining quality.
* Increase API test coverage by **40%** and ensure **100%** testing of critical APIs.
* Reduce average defect resolution time from **5 days to 3 days**.
* Implement performance testing capable of validating **1 million payroll transactions per hour**.
* Increase regression test automation by **50%**.
* Deploy a real-time QA metrics dashboard for complete visibility into quality, defects, and coverage.
* Ensure **100%** of software releases undergo security testing.
* Deliver quarterly QA training with full team participation.
* Improve software quality to support **99.9% payroll system uptime** by reducing production defects.