Lead, Software Quality Assurance- Contract-to-Hire

Lirio is a technology/software company that provides expertise in a variety of behavioral science domains (e.g., behavioral economics, social psychology, public health), data science, and machine learning to drive consumer engagement, close gaps in preventive and chronic care, and promote health and well-being across an individual’s lifespan. Lirio’s behavior change AI platform unites behavioral science with advanced artificial intelligence (AI) to deliver Precision Nudging health interventions. Precision Nudging is the application of behavioral science to health interventions personalized by AI to each individual that overcome barriers to action at the right time and place for scalable, behavior change. 

This is a remote role with the opportunity to be hybrid if located in Tennessee. All applicants must be authorized to work in the US without sponsorship.

To ensure an excellent onboarding experience and integration into the company, new colleagues will spend their first week onsite at one of our offices in Tennessee. Travel expenses will be paid. This is a requirement. 

This is a contract-to-hire role. The contract period is 3-6 months with conversion dependent on performance.

Position Summary 

The Software QA Lead Engineer is accountable for quality strategy and execution across Lirio’s cloud-native platform, user interfaces, and customer integrations. This role leads a shift-left quality approach across squads (Platform, Enterprise, Data/ML, etc.), owning test strategy, automation, and quality gates for web/UI experiences, services, APIs, event-driven workflows, and data flows in a regulated healthcare environment. 
 
This role involves mentoring QA engineers, designing and implementing test automation frameworks, and conducting code and test reviews, while partnering closely with Engineering, Product, Cloud/SRE, and Customer Operations to ensure releases are reliable, observable, and audit-ready. 

Essential Duties & Responsibilities 

Quality Assurance Leadership (50%) 

• Lead the design, implementation, and execution of comprehensive test strategy across APIs, services, event-driven workflows (Kafka), and UI surfaces.
• Own and evolve automated test coverage (unit, integration, contract, end-to-end) and maintain a risk-based manual test strategy where automation is not practical.
• Ensure test coverage for functional, regression, integration, performance, and reliability testing (timeouts, retries, idempotency, failure modes).
• Advocate for quality engineering practices (TDD where appropriate, CI quality gates, code review standards, and testability in design).
• Define and maintain quality gates in CI/CD (e.g., minimum coverage thresholds, contract test pass, critical path E2E pass, vulnerability scan pass where applicable).
• Partner with Cloud/SRE to validate release readiness via observability (logging, metrics, tracing) and operational dashboards
• Embed quality and testability considerations into feature and system design by reviewing application logic, APIs, data models, event contracts, and UI workflows in partnership with engineers.
• Establish and enforce standards for automation quality, including flakiness reduction, stabilization practices, clear ownership, and expectations for timely remediation of broken or unreliable tests.
• Define and document QA processes and best practices. 

Product Owner & Development Support (10%) 

• Collaborate with product owners and developers to clarify requirements and acceptance criteria.
• Participate in backlog refinement and sprint planning to ensure testability of features.
• Facilitate agile ceremonies as needed. 

Mentorship & Subject Matter Expertise (25%) 

• Build and maintain shared QA practices, documentation, and knowledge-sharing mechanisms (playbooks, training, cross-coverage) to avoid single points of failure across squads and releases. 
• Standardize testing approaches for event-driven systems, including message schema validation, backward compatibility, replay scenarios, idempotency, ordering assumptions, a