QA LEAD ENGINEER

QA Lead Engineer (E-Commerce/Loyalty)Location: Atlanta, GAWe are seeking an experienced QA Lead to define, drive, and execute the quality assurance strategy for a large-scale digital platform modernization and integration orchestration program within the QSR and e-commerce ecosystem.This role will lead end-to-end testing efforts across cloud-native microservices, API gateways, event-driven systems, loyalty platforms, identity services, and commerce integrations, ensuring production readiness, scalability, security, and resilience.Strong experience in e-commerce, loyalty platforms (Paytronix preferred), API testing, event-driven systems, and cloud-native architectures is highly desirable. The ideal candidate brings deep expertise in automation frameworks, API testing, AWS-native systems, CI/CD pipelines, observability-driven quality practices, and Agile delivery models, with strong exposure to e-commerce and loyalty-centric customer journeys.Key Responsibilities:Define and own the end-to-end QA strategy, roadmap, and execution model across discovery, build, integration, and production rollout phases.Lead QA planning, estimation, and execution across cloud-native microservices, API layers, middleware orchestration services, identity and loyalty systems, and third-party integrations.Design and implement test strategies for event-driven architectures, asynchronous systems, and API gateways, including functional, regression, performance, security, and resiliency testing.Drive automation-first quality practices, building scalable frameworks for API automation, UI automation, integration testing, and contract testing.Establish continuous testing pipelines integrated with CI/CD workflows, enabling feature flag validation, progressive release testing, and canary deployments.Own production readiness validation, including traffic routing through proxy/shim layers, caching behavior validation, failover scenarios, and graceful degradation testing.Lead performance, load, and stress testing to validate system scalability during peak transaction volumes and high concurrency scenarios.Implement observability-driven QA practices, leveraging logs, metrics, and distributed tracing (OpenTelemetry) for proactive defect detection and root cause analysis.Drive test environment management, including cloud-based test setups, test data strategies, and service virtualization for dependent systems.Partner closely with architects, DevOps, product owners, and engineering teams to ensure quality gates, guardrails, and governance controls are embedded throughout the SDLC.Mentor QA engineers drive best practices, establish test standards, and continuously improve testing effectiveness and efficiency.Provide transparent reporting on quality metrics, risks, release readiness, and defect trends to stakeholders.Preferred Qualifications:10-15 years of experience in Quality Engineering, with 3+ years in a QA leadership role for enterprise-scale platforms.Strong experience testing microservices, REST APIs, API gateways, and event-driven architectures.Hands-on expertise with automation frameworks such as Selenium, Playwright, Cypress, RestAssured, Postman/Newman, Karate, JMeter, or equivalent tools.Proven experience in CI/CD-based continuous testing models using Jenkins, GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, AWS DevOps, or similar.Strong experience testing cloud-native platforms on AWS, including containerized and serverless workloads.Experience validating loyalty platforms, identity systems, and digital commerce workflows.Strong understanding of e-commerce funnels, payment workflows, checkout flows, customer engagement journeys, and loyalty lifecycle management.Experience implementing performance testing, resiliency testing, chaos testing, and security testing strategies.Strong analytical, communication, stakeholder management, and leadership skills.Experience working in Agile / Scrum / SAFe environments.Nice To Have:Direct experience testing loyalty platforms such as Paytronix or equivalent systems.Experience in QSR, retail, hospitality, or high-scale consumer digital ecosystems.Hands-on experience with feature flags, progressive rollouts, canary releases, and A/B testing validation.Exposure to OpenTelemetry, distributed tracing platforms, and observability tooling.Experience testing high-volume transaction systems with strict latency SLAs.Certifications in ISTQB, Agile Testing, Cloud, or DevOps practices.