(RD) Lead Principal QA Engineer - SME

Lead Principal QA Engineer

Join Backbase as a Lead Principal QA Engineer and help shape the future of our Digital Banking platform. You’ll take a strategic, value-stream-wide approach to quality—elevating testing standards, championing automation, and embedding a culture of quality across product teams. This role is about leadership, influence, and long-term impact—not just executing tests, but transforming how testing happens at scale.

What you'll do

As a Lead Principal QA Engineer, you’re part of the technical leadership within the value stream and a key member of the QA Guild. Your mission is to ensure quality is not just a step in delivery but a mindset embedded across the organization. You’ll define and guide QA strategy across teams, aligning it with the broader product and engineering vision.

You will:

• Drive QA strategy, standards, and alignment across multiple teams in the value stream;
• Ensure testing approaches (manual, automated, exploratory, performance, security, etc.) meet high-quality standards across all products—web, mobile, backend;
• Mentor and guide QA Engineers of all levels, fostering technical and professional growth;
• Champion test automation and CI/CD best practices, ensuring reusable and scalable solutions;
• Collaborate with Engineering Managers, Product Owners, and other stakeholders to embed quality from discovery through delivery.
• Own the QA OKRs within the value stream, ensuring timely and measurable progress;
• Lead strategic QA initiatives and contribute to the evolution of QA Guild standards and tools;
• Act as the go-to quality expert for both internal teams and external stakeholders—bringing clarity through metrics, risk analysis, and test strategy communication.

Who you are

You're a quality leader who thrives on scale, complexity, and coaching others. You're comfortable switching between strategic thinking and deep technical discussions. You know that true quality is more than testing—it's about mindset, process, and technical excellence.

We’d love to see:

• 7–10+ years in QA roles, with significant experience in strategy, automation, and cross-team collaboration;
• Proven experience influencing and guiding QA practices across multiple teams or products;
• Strong knowledge of web and mobile test automation, ideally with tools like Playwright, Appium, Selenium, Postman etc etc. We are looking for someone who is Polyglot when it comes to testing;
• Hands-on programming ability in one or more modern languages (e.g., JavaScript, Java, Python);
• Comfort working in CI/CD pipelines and cloud environments;
• Experience mentoring QA Engineers and shaping career paths;
• Ability to align testing initiatives with business and product goals;
• Strong communicator with stakeholder-facing experience.