QA Lead

About Rugiet

Rugiet is a fast-growing, Austin-based direct-to-consumer telemedicine company reinventing men's health. We combine clinical rigor, luxury service, and a modern digital experience to deliver personalized, compounded treatments at scale.We're not here to blend in. We're building the future of healthcare and we move fast.

About the role

Quality at Rugiet isn't a checkpoint at the end of a sprint. We ship medications that people actually take, on a cadence that needs to feel effortless from the first landing page to the moment a refill shows up at someone's door. Every confusing copy line, mistimed email, awkward checkout step, or off-by-one detail in a clinical workflow is a quality issue - whether or not it ever shows up as a bug ticket.

We're hiring a QA Lead to own that bar. This person isn't a gatekeeper, isn't a clicking machine, and isn't someone who writes a test plan and hands it off. They're a hands-on builder who pairs deep automation chops with old-school product obsession - the kind of person who wakes up every morning and asks, "Is every corner of our experience as good as it could be?" - and then goes and finds out.

On the technical side, you'll write tests every week, own our automation framework and CI/CD quality gates end-to-end, and lead the decision on what stays, gets rebuilt, or gets retired as we transition towards in-house automation. This is an IC-leader role - you'll lead by building.

This role reports into engineering and works hand-in-glove with product, design, clinical ops, and our provider network.

A non-negotiable

You'll run the Rugiet patient experience yourself - for real. Before you ship your first test, you'll have active accounts and live prescriptions in production across every one of our product lines , going through real intake, real provider review, real fulfillment, real shipping, real refills, and real support touchpoints. The medications themselves don't have to be consumed - the patient flow does. If running the actual customer journey end-to-end isn't something you'd be excited to do, this isn't your role.

What you'll do

Own quality as customer experience, not just code correctness

• Be the loudest voice in the room for anything that could confuse, frustrate, or erode trust with a patient - copy ambiguity, layout regressions, slow flows, inconsistent states, surprising emails - even when none of it is technically a "bug"
• Walk every flow regularly the way a real customer would, across web and mobile, across product lines, on real devices
• Translate customer and business context into testing priorities - you know which flows are revenue-critical, which are clinically sensitive, and which can tolerate more risk
• Partner with support and clinical ops to close the loop between customer-reported friction and what we test for

Lead and shift quality left

• Own our overall QA strategy and roadmap, balancing velocity with reliability
• Manage and mentor the QA team (small today, will grow as we earn it)
• Embed in sprint planning, design reviews, and architecture discussions - quality concerns surface before code is written, not after
• Define testability as part of definition of done, and partner with engineering to make it stick
• Drive root-cause analysis on every escape and ship systemic fixes, not patches

Build the automation backbone

• Write, maintain, and improve automated tests (unit, integration, E2E) - you are hands-on, every week
• Audit current automation tooling (we're transitioning off an external vendor toward in-house automation) and decide what stays, what goes, and what we build
• Build reliable CI/CD quality gates that catch regressions before they reach production
• Instrument coverage and quality metrics, and report on them in a way leadership actually uses

Use modern tooling, including AI, pragmatically

• Evaluate and apply AI-assisted testing where it actually moves the needle (test generation, visual regression, flake detection, intelligent triage)
• Stay current on the QA tooling landscape and make smart bets, not trendy ones

What we're looking for

Must-haves

• Customer obsession that shows up in specifics. You can cite real examples of user confusion you caught that didn't start as bugs - copy, sequencing, expectations, edge-case empty states. You think in terms of patient experience, not severity tiers.
• Business and product context. You can explain why a regression matters in revenue, clinical, or trust terms - not just "P1/P2." You ask about the customer and the business model before you ask about the framework.
• Willingness to live the patient flow. You're genuinely excited to run every Rugiet product line through real production accounts end-to-end.
• 5+ years in QA / SDET roles, including 1-2+ years leading or mentoring others
• Strong hands-on automation skills - fluent in at least one major framework (Playwright, Cypress, Selenium, Maestro, etc.)
• Deep CI/CD familiarity (GitHub Actions, CircleCI, or similar) with a track record of integrating automated tests well
• Experience maturing QA practice in a fast-moving startup or small engineering team
• Clear communicator who can translate risk into language a non-technical exec actually internalizes

Strong plusses

• Experience in healthcare, telehealth, regulated industries, or DTC e-commerce
• Hands-on with AI-powered testing tools or applying LLMs to test generation / maintenance
• API testing fluency (REST / GraphQL) alongside UI automation
• Performance, load, or security testing exposure
• Experience migrating off a vendor QA platform onto in-house automation
• Observability and production monitoring as part of your quality signal, not just pre-prod test suites

What success looks like

• 30 days: You've got live accounts and prescriptions running through production on every Rugiet product line. You've audited current automation coverage, manual processes, tooling, and where escapes have been happening. You have a clear, opinionated point of view on the gaps - including UX issues that aren't bugs but matter.
• 90 days: You've shipped measurable CI quality-gate improvements, stood up a regression triage process, and the team is operating off a shared quality playbook. You're already surfacing customer-experience issues that engineering wouldn't have caught on its own.
• 6 months: Regression escapes to customers are materially down. Quality is a first-class voice in every sprint. Engineers, PMs, and designers pull you in early instead of being chased late. Patients feel a noticeably tighter experience across every corner of the product.

Why this role, why now

• Real ownership - quality strategy is yours to define, not handed to you
• Small team, high leverage; what you build will matter to real patients on day one
• We're investing in doing this right, not checking a QA box
• Competitive salary, equity, and benefits