Qa Lead Consultant

About the role

The QA Lead owns test strategy, requirements coverage, test governance, execution oversight, defect management, reporting, environment readiness, and automation direction. This is a leadership role that also requires strong hands-on technical capability in modern UI/API automation.

Responsibilities

• Test Leadership and Governance
  • Act as Test Lead for assigned programs, releases, modules, and production-readiness efforts.
  • Develop the overall test strategy, scope, entry/exit criteria, estimates, schedules, dependencies, and execution plan.
  • Assign and supervise testing work, review test artifacts, mentor testers, and enforce QA standards.
  • Coordinate with Business Analysts, Developers, Product Owners, Project Managers, DevOps, DBAs, and business stakeholders.
• Requirements Analysis and Coverage
  • Review BRDs, Functional Requirements (FRs), user stories, acceptance criteria, workflow diagrams, interface specifications, data mappings, and API specifications.
  • Identify missing, ambiguous, conflicting, or untestable requirements before execution begins.
  • Translate requirements into Test Scenarios (TS), Test Cases (TC), test data, preconditions, expected results, and automation candidates.
  • Drive complete, measurable traceability from requirements to executed tests and defects.
• Azure DevOps Test Plans
  • Create and maintain Test Plans, Test Suites, Test Cases, configurations, test runs, evidence, and defect links in Azure DevOps (ADO).
  • Establish consistent work-item relationships among BRDs/FRs, TSs, TCs, executions, defects, retests, and closure.
  • Use ADO queries and dashboards to communicate progress, blockers, defects, coverage, and release readiness.
• Test Design and Execution
  • Create and review Positive, Negative, Boundary Value, Equivalence Partitioning, Decision Table, State Transition, Role/Authorization, Data-Driven, and Risk-Based tests.
  • Coordinate and participate in Smoke, Functional, API, Integration, System, Regression, End-to-End, UAT, Performance-support, Database, and Data Pipeline testing.
  • Ensure failures are reproducible, evidence is complete, and test results are defensible.
• Defect and Release Management
  • Lead or participate in defect triage and severity/priority decisions.
  • Ensure defects contain environment/build information, reproducible steps, expected/actual results, evidence, and requirement/test links.
  • Provide evidence-based release recommendations and clearly communicate residual quality risk.
• Automation Leadership and Hands-On Capability
  • Design, review, troubleshoot, and when necessary implement Playwright or Selenium automation.
  • Understand and apply fixtures, browser contexts, authentication/role isolation, Page Object Model (POM), reusable API clients, data factories, setup/teardown, and parallel-safe execution.
  • Implement and review UI + API hybrid tests where the UI performs the action and API/database validation is used as the source of truth.
  • Use deterministic synchronization and Playwright auto-waiting/assertions; avoid arbitrary sleeps such as page.waitForTimeout as a synchronization strategy.
  • Review automation pull requests for correctness, maintainability, test isolation, error handling, naming, duplication, and framework standards.
  • Understand network interception, request/response validation, traces, screenshots, video, reporting, retries, tags, and environment configuration.
  • Integrate automated tests into CI/CD quality gates and distinguish product defects from automation, environment, network, and test-data failures.
• API, Database, and Data Pipeline Testing
  • Validate REST API behavior across GET, POST, PUT/PATCH, and DELETE operations including headers, authorization, request bodies, response contracts, business result codes, error messages, concurrency/version behavior, and negative paths.
  • Recognize that application authorization may be represented by business-result values (e.g., HTTP 200 with a denial result) and must be tested against the documented application contract.
  • Use SQL to validate persisted data, joins, filters, aggregates, referential integrity, backend state, and source-to-target outcomes.
  • Validate ETL/ELT and data pipelines including transformation rules, record-count reconciliation, nulls, duplicates, rejected records, incremental loads, data freshness, restart/recovery, and source-to-target accuracy.

Skills

• Quality assurance
• Quality assurance testing
• Test case
• Test automation
• Selenium
• Playwright

Additional Skills & Qualifications

• Playwright + TypeScript framework design and migration experience from Selenium.
• Experience with reusable fixtures, API clients, Page Object Models, test-data factories, and parallel test execution.

Pay

The pay range for this position is $35.00 – $50.00/hr. Individual compensation offered within this range will depend on qualifications, skills, relevant experience, job knowledge, geographic location, internal equity, and other pertinent job-related factors.

Benefits

• Medical, dental & vision
• Critical Illness, Accident, and Hospital
• 401(k) Retirement Plan – Pre-tax and Roth post-tax contributions available
• Life Insurance (Voluntary Life & AD&D for the employee and dependents)
• Short and long-term disability
• Health Spending Account (HSA)
• Transportation benefits
• Employee Assistance Program
• Time Off/Leave (PTO, Vacation or Sick Leave)

Schedule

This is a hybrid position in Columbus, OH.