Quality Engineering Lead

Element451 is building the AI-powered platform reshaping how colleges and universities recruit, enroll, and support their students — and quality is how we earn the trust of the institutions that run on us. This is a rare chance to own and build a modern quality system end to end: set the strategy, build the team and infrastructure that deliver it, and lead how a high-performing engineering org bakes quality in across the full lifecycle. If you want to shape a discipline rather than inherit one — and you believe quality engineering is being reinvented by AI right now — you’ll feel at home here. ## The Role You’ll own quality engineering at Element451 — the strategy, the system, and the team that delivers it. This is a player-coach role: most of your time goes to leading — managing and growing a team of quality engineers, setting quality strategy across the full SDLC, and building the systems, tooling, and practices that make it real — and you stay hands-on in the testing itself, because you can’t curate a quality system you’ve stopped practicing. Quality here is an enablement function, not a gate. Your team isn’t the bug-finder of last resort between engineering and release; you build the personas, journeys, infrastructure, agents, and signals that let every engineer hit a high bar themselves. It’s also an explicitly AI-forward role: we expect you to bring thought leadership on how agentic AI reshapes quality work and to operationalize it across your team. ## What You’ll Own You own the quality system across the full lifecycle — from refinement and design through automation, release, and production. Quality isn’t a phase you run before launch; it’s a property the whole org builds in, and you own the system that makes it possible. In practice, you: - Set and own quality strategy across the full SDLC — shift-left into refinement and design, define release-quality signals, and lead production escape analysis. - Lead, manage, and grow the quality engineering team — hire, coach, set standards, and develop QEs into force multipliers for the engineers they partner with. - Build and curate the quality system — the persona and journey model, the end-to-end automation suite, the test observability layer (flake, escape, time-to-feedback, coverage), and the shared tooling developers rely on — as a living product your team delivers. - Make quality measurable and legible — define the metrics that matter and the dashboards that surface them. - Champion agentic AI across the practice — pilot and scale AI-assisted test generation and agent-based testing, own the evaluation discipline for our AI features, and set the human-in-the-loop governance that holds AI-assisted work to the same bar as anything written by hand. - Stay hands-on — design and write tests on high-risk work, set patterns by example, and keep your technical depth current. - Partner across Engineering and Product as the owner of the quality discipline — drive cross-cutting initiatives and represent quality in how the org plans and ships. ## How You’ll Show Up We hire for behavior as much as for experience. We’re looking for someone who: - Lives our values, and builds team culture through behavior, not policy. - Leads as a force multiplier — measures success by the org’s quality outcomes and the engineers the system makes better, not by the bugs they personally find. - Is excellent by default, and holds the quality system to a higher standard than the minimum. - Leads with service — treats developer enablement as core to the job. - Puts the team and product first — partners with engineering and product rather than positioning quality as a separate gate. - Communicates with clarity and honesty — surfaces signal and risk proactively. - Treats feedback as a gift, and gives it to the team generously and well. ## What You Bring - 7+ years in quality engineering, including proven experience leading quality practices, teams, or processes in a complex, multi-tenant SaaS product. - Experi…