Principal Quality Engineer

About the role

LawnStarter is looking for its first Principal Quality Engineer to own and evolve the company‑wide quality engineering vision. Reporting to the Head of Engineering, you will lead the existing QA squad, drive AI‑native tooling, and shape the quality roadmap as the organization scales.

Key responsibilities

• Define and maintain a company‑wide quality strategy, including a quality accountability framework for engineers, EMs, and PMs.
• Design test strategies across the stack – unit, component, contract, API, end‑to‑end, mobile, performance, load, and accessibility.
• Advance AI‑native quality tooling such as Claude Code agents for on‑demand test generation and code review.
• Own CI/CD and test infrastructure, setting quality gates, visual regression pipelines, and performance budgets.
• Integrate production quality signals with monitoring and incident response dashboards.
• Provide technical mentorship to QA engineers across squads and influence engineering managers on performance reviews.

Required profile

• AI‑native practitioner who already uses AI agents or Claude‑style tooling for test generation and code quality.
• Strategic thinker who tailors testing approaches to each team’s maturity rather than imposing a single framework.
• Hands‑on expert across the full test pyramid, able to unblock pipelines and ship test suites.
• Patient teacher who can coach engineers while also building CI pipelines and tooling.
• Comfortable influencing without direct headcount ownership, with potential to manage QA staff as the squad grows.

Required skills

• AI agents and Claude Code tooling
• CI/CD pipeline design and maintenance
• Test generation and automated code review
• Unit, component, contract, API, and end‑to‑end testing
• Performance, load, and accessibility testing
• Mobile test automation using emulators and real device clouds
• Visual regression testing pipelines
• Monitoring dashboards and production quality signal integration