Principal Quality Engineer

About This Opportunity

Our talent team is representing a confidential technology client in their search for a Principal Quality Engineer. This is a remote role open to candidates worldwide.

Our client has built a strong foundation in quality engineering—shared standards, working CI/CD gates, and AI-integrated tooling are already in place. What's missing is dedicated leadership to own the vision, drive continuous improvement, and unify the QA discipline across engineering teams. This role fills that gap.

You'll be the first Principal Quality Engineer, reporting to the Head of Engineering. This isn't traditional QA management focused on ticket approval or bug counts. You'll take ownership of existing quality standards and tooling, work collaboratively with the distributed QA team to evolve them, and push the state of quality engineering forward as the organization scales.

Responsibilities

• Own the company-wide quality engineering roadmap and accountability framework that defines what engineers, engineering managers, and product managers each own at every stage of software delivery
• Define and evolve test strategy across the full stack: unit, component, contract, API, end-to-end, mobile, and non-functional testing including performance, load, and accessibility
• Advance AI-native quality tooling: build and maintain AI agents and workflows (similar to Claude Code) that engineers can use on-demand for test generation, code review, and quality guidance
• Manage CI/CD and test infrastructure: required checks, quality gates, E2E and visual regression pipelines, performance budgets, and mobile test automation strategy across emulators and real device clouds
• Connect production quality signals to incident response and build monitoring dashboards teams actually use
• Provide technical mentorship to QA engineers across all squads, owning the craft and technical direction of the discipline organization-wide
• Drive measurable improvements in pipeline performance, test flakiness, and quality metrics within the first year

What We're Looking For

Required Experience & Skills:

• AI-native quality engineering experience: you actively use AI to generate tests and have implemented agentic tooling (Claude Code, MCP-based workflows, or similar) so engineers can run on-demand test generation or code review
• Strategic thinking over tool evangelism: you design testing approaches based on team maturity and context, not predetermined frameworks or coverage mandates
• Deep hands-on experience across the test pyramid: you've personally built and maintained component, contract, API, E2E, and performance test suites—not just reviewed them
• Infrastructure and tooling implementation: you build CI pipelines and quality tooling yourself, not just document requirements for others
• Teaching and enablement skills: comfortable coaching engineers on testing practices while still shipping technical work yourself
• Influence without direct management: effective at driving technical direction and mentoring across teams, even when not managing day-to-day work or career development

Preferred:

• Previous experience hiring, coaching, and managing performance for QA or engineering teams (this role may grow into direct management as the QA function scales)

This role is NOT a fit if you:

• Need direct reports from day one to feel engaged
• Prefer advisory-only work without hands-on technical implementation
• Want to replace existing systems with a pre-packaged process or favorite tool stack
• Measure success primarily by team headcount growth rather than quality outcomes

How We Work With You

Candidates apply directly through Get A Job.ai. Our recruiting team conducts an initial screening to assess fit and gather your questions about the role and client. Once we align on mutual interest, we submit your profile to our client for consideration. Please do not attempt to contact the client directly—all communication flows through our talent team to ensure a structured, professional process.

Pay

Pay via Get A Job.ai: $80,000–$100,000 USD annually.

This is a fully remote position. The role involves deep analytical work with collaboration across US time zones, so some schedule flexibility for overlap hours is expected.

Get A Job.ai provides equal employment opportunities to all qualified applicants without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age, disability, or genetics.