Lead QA Engineer

About Noon

We are on a mission to reinvent how designers work in the AI era. We’re backed by top investors including First Round, Chemistry, Homebrew, Scribble and senior leaders from OpenAI, Meta, Google, Ramp, Stripe and more. We’re building the next-generation AI design tool for product teams.

About the Role

We are seeking a QA Lead to take end-to-end ownership of regression prevention. In this role, you will consolidate quality ownership, moving beyond fragmented efforts to become the primary technical owner of test-suite health. You will be responsible for converting manual regression processes into a robust, trusted automation framework, defining the standards for test effectiveness, and implementing objective, evidence-based release gates across all environments.

This is a highly technical leadership position focused on architecture and execution rather than simple triage. You will design and build the automation infrastructure while serving as the final authority on release quality. While the fundamental testing foundations and CI pipelines are established, you will provide the necessary ownership and rigor to ensure a high-quality product delivery cycle.

What You'll Own

• Comprehensive regression automation: Turn the highest-priority (P0) intent flows across every core product family into automated tests using the repository's existing step-ID grammar, then extend coverage through P1-P3 with severity tagging for on-demand, modular execution.
• Test-quality certification: Set a real bar for what counts as an effective test - behavior-driven accuracy, mutation testing, zero-retry reliability, and outcome-based assertions instead of raw test-count or line-coverage metrics.
• Self-sustaining quality gates: Automate suite execution across every merge and release promotion, own the manual verification of the 25-30 highest-frequency canvas actions, and track manual-to-automated drift as a core metric.
• Measurable release quality: Drive down regression failures per PR merge and keep major P0-P2 defects out of production, while accelerating detection and resolution times.
• Rigorous RCA: Institute a strict root-cause-analysis process where issues are closed only once a preventive measure - a new test, a review check, a module restriction - is actually deployed, not just documented.
• Strategic decisions: Standardize severity SLAs, define the full automated-coverage map, optimize merge-vs-promotion gates with data, and pilot AI-driven PR risk signals.
• Team and adoption: Build and grow a high-performing quality engineering team, and create an automation framework that developers want to use rather than route around.

What We're Looking For

This role calls for an automation-first quality engineer who can both architect a test framework and run the release-quality operating system around it. You should be equally comfortable writing the framework yourself and telling leadership a release isn't ready - candidates who can only do one of those two things will struggle here.

You should have

• designed, built, and driven CI-integrated adoption of a test-automation framework - covering web plus at least one non-web surface (desktop, mobile, or API).
• strong, current, hands-on TypeScript/JavaScript skills.
• production experience with Playwright (or an equivalent modern browser-automation stack) at real scale.
• hands-on ownership of CI test-execution infrastructure - sharding, containerized runs, parallelism, artifact/report plumbing, and flake control.
• the judgment to distinguish a test that protects real behavior from one that only looks like it does - mock-heavy vs. real-seam, outcome assertions vs. call assertions.
• experience designing a trustworthy, severity-based regression suite (P0-P3).
• direct, first-hand experience holding a release gate against real delivery pressure.

Good to have

• Electron or installed-desktop-app automation experience.
• mutation testing, or any other rigorous method for proving a suite catches real faults.
• visual-regression testing and component-contract testing in a browser runtime (Vitest browser mode, Jest + real DOM).
• experience testing complex, stateful UIs - canvases, editors, drag-and-drop, undo/redo.
• test-data and fixture architecture, and instrumentation of test health (flake dashboards, coverage-vs-confidence reporting).
• root-cause-analysis facilitation and experience mentoring or growing a small team.
• experience working in a codebase where a large share of the diff volume is AI-generated.

Qualifications

• 8-13 years in test automation or quality engineering, including 3-5 years at Lead / Staff / Test Architect / Engineering Manager scope, owning both a framework and a small team (roughly 2-6 people).
• demonstrably hands-on with TypeScript or JavaScript today - not several years ago.
• production experience with Playwright, WebdriverIO, Cypress, or an equivalent, at meaningful scale, plus ownership of CI/CD test pipelines.
• experience with a product shipped as an installed client (desktop or mobile), and exposure to a complex stateful UI product, are both strong pluses.
• a degree is not required, and testing-craft credentials (BBST, AST, or similar) are a welcome signal of deliberate practice - not a requirement.

Benefits

• Base Salary: Above market; among the top ~1% of Bengaluru compensation bands
• Equity: Meaningful stock options
• Health Insurance: Best-in-class coverage for the employee and their entire family
• Location: Bengaluru
• Work Style: In-office, full-time. We're a small, high-ownership team that collaborates very closely from our WeWork Marathahalli office