Quality Assurance Lead

About the role

We’re hiring a very senior QA Lead / Quality Engineering Lead to raise the quality bar across Paragon and help us build a release model that scales.

This is not a traditional manual QA role, and it is not a pure people-management role. Our QA engineers are embedded within product teams, and this person will act as the functional leader across that group. You’ll define how quality is owned, how releases are validated, where automation should live, and how we reduce the amount of manual regression required to ship quickly and safely.

Today, quality is still too dependent on repetitive manual testing. We want someone who can help us change that. You’ll partner closely with engineering, product, platform, and our embedded QA engineers to build a more scalable quality model, improve release confidence, and drive the strategy that lets us ship faster with less manual overhead.

A big part of this role is helping Paragon get to a world where we can deploy dozens of times per day with high confidence. We’re looking for someone who has worked in that kind of environment before, or has helped build toward it in a meaningful way. You should have strong instincts around release safety, automation strategy, test layering, and how to move quality earlier in the development lifecycle so QA is not the bottleneck.

This is a high-impact role for someone who has both strong QA instincts and strong systems thinking. You should be equally comfortable evaluating release risk, improving test strategy, coaching QA engineers, and helping teams decide what belongs in unit, integration, end-to-end, and post-deploy testing.

What you’ll do

• Own the cross-team quality strategy across Paragon’s product surface area

• Define and enforce a clear testing strategy across unit, integration, end-to-end, and live-environment testing

• Partner with engineering teams to reduce reliance on manual regression and increase high-value automated coverage

• Help define which test coverage should live in the monorepo and which should live in QA-owned live-environment automation

• Establish clear release gates, smoke suites, and risk-based regression standards

• Help evolve our quality systems so Paragon can deploy dozens of times per day with high confidence

• Work with embedded QA engineers to improve consistency in test planning, test case design, bug reporting, release validation, and automation priorities

• Coach teams on what quality ownership should look like for new features so automation is built in rather than added later

• Drive improvements in test reliability, flake reduction, coverage quality, and release confidence

• Partner with platform and SRE on environment stability, deploy verification, rollback confidence, and post-release checks

• Improve the way we triage escaped defects and use them to strengthen the right layer of coverage

• Help shape a quality operating model where QA is focused on high-leverage work rather than acting as a bottleneck for every release

• Act as a player-coach when needed by reviewing test plans, contributing to automation strategy, and jumping into important quality problems directly

What we’re looking for

• Significant experience leading quality strategy for complex SaaS or infrastructure-style products

• Strong experience across manual testing, test automation, regression strategy, release validation, and risk-based testing

• Experience building or improving automated test coverage in collaboration with engineering teams

• Deep understanding of the tradeoffs between unit, integration, API, end-to-end, and post-deploy testing

• Experience working in an embedded QA or cross-functional product team model

• Strong judgment around where human testing adds value and where it should be replaced by automation

• Experience improving release processes and reducing QA bottlenecks in a growing engineering organization

• Experience working in an environment with very high deployment frequency, or helping an organization build toward a model where teams can deploy dozens of times per day with high confidence

• Strong instincts around release safety, test gating, change risk, and how to keep main and staging healthy as deployment frequency increases

• Strong written and verbal communication skills

• Ability to influence engineers, managers, and cross-functional partners without relying on org hierarchy

• Comfort operating in a hands-on, ambiguous environment where you are helping define the function as you go

What success looks like

In your first few months, you’ll build a clear view of where quality is slowing us down and where risk is slipping through. You’ll help us standardize how embedded QA engineers operate, define a better release testing model, and identify the highest-leverage automation gaps.

Over time, your work should make releases faster, more reliable, and less dependent on large manual regression cycles. Engineers should have clearer expectations for quality ownership. QA engineers should be spending more time on automation strategy, exploratory testing, and high-value validation rather than repetitive manual execution.

Most importantly, you’ll help us build toward a world where Paragon can deploy dozens of times per day with high confidence, without relying on QA as a manual bottleneck before every release.

Why this role matters

As Paragon grows, quality can’t depend on more and more manual effort. We need a leader who can help us build a quality system that scales with the business and supports much higher release velocity.

This role is central to increasing deployment frequency, improving confidence in what we ship, and helping the entire engineering organization operate with a higher bar for quality.

I’d also slightly prefer Quality Engineering Lead even more with this wording, since “dozens of times a day” pushes the role toward release systems and automation strategy rather than traditional QA.

Compensation & benefits

We’re hiring for this role in the United States (remote), with competitive base salary + equity, depending on experience and location.

In addition to base salary, we offer:

• A brand new laptop and any additional equipment you need to do your best work

• Top-of-the-line health, dental, and vision insurance

• Paid, gender-neutral parental leave (including adoption and foster placement)

• Flexible working hours (we focus on outcomes, not time online)

• Unlimited PTO, with a minimum encouraged amount per year

• Annual team retreats

• Interview accommodations available upon request