Senior Release QA Analyst

About the Role

Level is seeking a Senior Release QA Analyst to own release quality, ensuring the team has clear, evidence-based confidence in whether a build is ready to ship. This senior-level individual contributor role involves running release-readiness and regression testing, driving defects to resolution, and improving release safety and speed. You’ll work closely with Engineering, Product, and Support in a fast-paced, small team environment.

Responsibilities

• Own release-readiness testing end-to-end: test planning, regression, smoke, and post-deploy verification.
• Run go/no-go checks and provide release owners with clear, evidence-based quality recommendations.
• Resolve release issues independently and take action to prevent recurrence through root-cause analysis and new test coverage.
• Report on release quality using metrics like defect escape rate, regression pass rate, and release cycle time.
• Lead small projects, such as automating regression suites or improving release checklists, including running meetings and communicating with stakeholders.
• Proactively identify and fix problems slowing the team down, prioritizing across competing releases and tasks.
• Build consensus and resolve conflicts on release timing, defect severity, and testing scope.
• Partner with Engineering, Product, Support, and other cross-functional teams to ensure successful releases.
• Contribute to recruiting, onboarding, and mentoring, including interviewing QA candidates and providing hire/no-hire feedback.

Qualifications

Need to Have:

• Several years of QA experience, with a track record of owning release or regression testing for a production product.
• Strong test design skills: ability to create risk-based test plans for loosely defined releases without detailed specs.
• Hands-on experience with test automation and CI/CD pipelines (e.g., Playwright, Cypress, Selenium, GitHub Actions).
• Fluency with defect tracking, test management tools, and API testing.
• Clear written and verbal communication, including explaining technical issues to non-technical audiences.
• Proactive, self-driven approach: initiative-taking and early problem escalation.

Nice to Have:

• Experience in a SaaS or ed tech environment.
• Accessibility testing experience.
• Experience mentoring junior QA staff.