Lead QA Engineer - Appfire

About Appfire

At Appfire, we believe that great work happens when people get to choose how they work. After 20 years of creating software that empowers teams to break silos and collaborate seamlessly, we've learned that one size does not fit all. We’re a team of 800+ employees, working remotely across 28 countries. Our flagship products include JXL, Comala Document Management, 7Pace Time Tracker, Jira Misc Workflow Extensions, and BigPicture.

About the Role

Join a product engineering organization where Playwright is the standard for E2E and API automation and AI-assisted QA is part of everyday work. As Lead QA Engineer, you hold the top individual contributor level for QA: you stay hands-on, tackle the hardest quality problems, and set the bar for automation and responsible AI use in testing.

You shape automation patterns and quality standards as the senior IC who makes good practices stick. You influence tools and quality practices as a technical advisor; broader strategy and technology choices are made with architects and engineering leadership. This is not a people-management role—impact comes through expertise, mentoring, and shared standards.

What You'll Do

• Build and refactor critical Playwright automation (UI and API) and evolve shared patterns, standards, and quality gates across squads.
• Act as the primary technical escalation for unstable suites, CI bottlenecks, test data and environment issues, and critical-path regressions.
• Define and improve test data and environment patterns (isolation, parallelism, fixtures) so automation scales reliably in CI/CD.
• Advise on API, component-level, and E2E test strategy (layering, coverage, and what to automate) in collaboration with architects and engineering leads.
• Mentor QA engineers on Playwright, CI, and AI-assisted workflows (prompting, review, safe use of tools); champion reusable approaches team-wide.
• Work with DevOps and developers on shift-left testing, pipeline reliability, and maintainable test environments (Docker, modern CI/CD).
• Communicate quality trade-offs and risks to product and engineering leadership.

What You'll Need

• 7+ years in QA/test engineering with a track record of evolving Playwright automation on large, long-lived SaaS products.
• Proven hands-on skills with Playwright (UI and API) and JavaScript/TypeScript and/or Python.
• Advanced daily use of AI-assisted development for test design, failure analysis, and coaching others; sound judgment on when human verification is required.
• Ability to diagnose and fix systemic quality issues (parallelism, test data, flakiness, pipeline design).
• Strong CI/CD experience running and improving automated suites and working with Docker in cloud-hosted delivery.
• Experience defining automation architecture and quality standards (framework patterns, gates, layering) used beyond a single squad.
• Excellent English and credibility with developers, architects, and leadership on risk and priorities.

What We Offer

• Indefinite Contract of Employment.
• Company equity eligibility for all team members.
• 26 paid vacation days annually, monthly Wellness Days (1 day per month), and 24 hours of paid volunteer time.
• Fully covered Luxmed private healthcare plan (with options to extend to partners or upgrade) and company-paid UNUM life insurance.
• MyBenefit Platform allowance (150 PLN per month).
• Home Office Allowance (200 PLN net per month) for electricity and internet expenses.
• Monthly Lunch Card (300 PLN) via a virtual pre-paid Pluxee card.