QA Team Lead

Position title


QA Team Lead


Primary work unit


Product


Responsible to


SVP Product


Responsible for


Establishing and leading quality assurance across ikeGPS's product portfolio, with hands-on ownership of test automation for key product releases.


Position status


☒Indefinite Duration • Fixed Term • Contract


Hours of work


40 Hours per week


Salary


Market Related Range ($95,000 - $115,000)


Our vision


IKE plays a key role in the engineering of the electrical grid across North America, and also enables communications networks to be built faster and at a higher quality digital standard. We care most about the success & wellbeing of the amazing people doing this important work.


Our mission and purpose


Our Mission is that, by 2033, IKE is the most trusted & admired company delivering productivity solutions for overhead network assessment & design in North America.


Our Purpose is Manaakitanga, which means We Rise By Lifting Others.


Our values


Simplicity and Clarity: In an industry dominated by complex products and language, IKE is differentiated by products and communications that are simple and clear.


Ingenuity: Our value chain stretches from the field to the cloud - every player on the IKE team brings their talents and resourcefulness to our customers and to each other.


Open Company. No Bullsh*t: With ourselves and with our customers. No ego. No politics. No hidden agendas. No hierarchical barriers that inhibit individual, team and company performance.


Be Yourself: Bring the best of yourself and all your gifts to work. We're lucky to have such talent both on and off the field. It makes work. Better.


Position purpose

The QA Team Lead establishes and champions a culture of quality excellence across ikeGPS's expanding product portfolio. This is a player-coach role, not a traditional people manager position. The QA Team Lead spends the majority of their time working alongside the team - building automation, executing tests, and setting technical standards - while providing mentoring, coaching, and day-to-day direction to a small team of QA Specialists. Leads the quality assurance function during a critical transformation as we grow and evolve our solutions serving utilities and communications companies across North America.

In this role, you will both lead a team of QA specialists and be directly responsible for testing efforts, establishing quality standards, implementing agentic testing strategies, and continuous improvement processes that ensure our products exceed customer expectations. You'll work at the intersection of legacy product maintenance and next-generation development, ensuring quality excellence across both domains.

Position location

Broomfield, Colorado, USA with Hybrid work Schedule per company policy; Remote may be considered for exceptional candidates.


Strategic context

The QA Team Lead plays a critical role in ikeGPS's transformation from a hardware-focused company to an AI-powered platform. As we expand our product portfolio to include multi-source data acquisition, advanced analytics, and intelligent workflow automation, quality assurance must evolve to address:

• Software quality for customer-facing applications and enterprise platforms
• Data quality for imagery and remote sensor data from diverse collection sources
• AI/ML model quality including accuracy, bias detection, and performance monitoring
• Integration quality across complex data pipelines and third-party systems
• User experience quality ensuring intuitive interfaces for complex technical capabilities
• Engineering calculation quality ensuring consistency and accuracy of analytical outputs across software version updates, with version-to-version variance documented and explained

This role is defined as a player-coach because the immediate need is hands-on: someone who personally builds test automation for our key upcoming product releases. Successful delivery of automated test coverage on these releases is the pathway to taking on a fuller QA management role.


This role requires establishing comprehensive quality frameworks that balance thoroughness with agility, enabling rapid iteration while maintaining the high standards our customers expect.


KEY RESPONSIBILITIES


This role is ideal for quality assurance professionals who combine deep QA expertise with leadership capability, hands-on testing skills, and the ability to establish scalable quality processes that support both legacy products and next-generation platform development.


This year, new product releases anchor these responsibilities. The QA Team Lead is directly responsible for building and running automated test coverage to support successful delivery to market.


QA Practice Leadership & Mentorship (10%)

• Serve as the senior quality voice on the team - setting the standard through your own work and helping QA Specialists grow through example, feedback, and collaboration
• Share expertise with QA Specialists on testing approaches, tools, defect analysis, and quality best practices
• Establish clear quality standards and testing methodologies that provide consistency across the QA function
• Foster a culture of quality, continuous improvement, and customer advocacy across product and engineering teams
• Support onboarding of new QA team members and contribute to their ramp on IKE products and processes
• Build team capability in emerging quality practices including AI/ML testing and data quality validation

Outcomes: QA Specialists have a senior resource to learn from and escalate to. Quality standards are consistent and well-understood. Quality advocacy is embedded throughout the organization.


NOTE: This role provides technical mentorship and day-to-day team direction. Formal HR functions including performance management, compensation decisions, and headcount budgeting are supported by the People Function, SVP Product, and SVP Structural Analysis.


Quality Strategy & Standards (20%)

• Define and maintain quality standards for software, data, and AI/ML products
• Establish testing strategies appropriate for different product types and development stages
• Create quality frameworks balancing thoroughness with agility
• Define data quality standards for multi-source data acquisition (drone imagery, vehicle-based capture, mobile device, airborne, satellite)
• Establish AI/ML quality criteria including model accuracy, bias detection, and explainability
• Define engineering calculation quality standards, ensuring analytical outputs remain consistent across software versions, with a documented audit trail of any version-to-version variance in calculated results
• Partner with Product Management to define acceptance criteria and definition of "done"
• Document quality standards and testing methodologies for organizational consistency

Outcomes: Clear, comprehensive quality standards guide all product development. Testing strategies align with product risk profiles and development velocity needs. AI/ML products meet rigorous quality criteria for accuracy and fairness. Engineering calculation outputs are reliable and traceable across releases.


Test Process & Automation (25%)

• Design and implement scalable test processes supporting Agile development and continuous delivery
• Build test automation strategy and roadmap prioritizing high-value automation opportunities
• Establish automated testing for regression, integration, and end-to-end workflows
• Create efficient test data management practices ensuring realistic, privacy-compliant test data
• Develop performance testing and load testing capabilities for cloud-native applications
• Proficiency with web and desktop application test automation tooling (Selenium, Cypress, Playwright, SmartBear, or similar)
• Incorporate AI-powered productivity tools as a core part of your workflow - from test case generation and defect pattern analysis to QA documentation. We expect and support AI-assisted working using tools like Claude and Copilot
• Develop and maintain test documentation including traceability matrices linking requirements to test cases
• Evaluate and implement testing tools and frameworks that improve team effectiveness
• Build and own the automated test suite for key product initiatives from initial development through general availability release this calendar year

Outcomes: Automated testing provides fast feedback on code quality. Test automation reduces manual effort on repetitive testing while freeing team for exploratory and complex testing. AI tools accelerate test creation, documentation, and analysis.


Cross-Functional Collaboration (15%)

• Partner with Product Managers and Product Owners to understand requirements and define acceptance criteria
• Collaborate with Engineering teams to advocate for testability, quality, and customer experience
• Assess and communicate the customer impact of defects, translating technical issues into business risk and prioritizing accordingly
• Work with Product Managers to integrate quality into design and specification processes
• Coordinate with User Support to analyze customer-reported issues and identify improvement opportunities
• Engage with US and New Zealand-based engineering teams, accommodating time zone differences
• Participate in sprint planning, retrospectives, and product planning activities
• Communicate quality status, risks, and improvements to leadership and stakeholders

Outcomes: Quality is integrated throughout product development lifecycle. Cross-functional teams share ownership of quality outcomes. Customer issues are systematically analyzed and prevented. Defect priority is always framed in terms of customer impact.


Hands-On Testing & Quality Assurance (30%)

• Actively contribute to testing workload by executing test plans alongside team members, particularly for releases requiring additional capacity or specialized expertise
• Personally conduct testing for high-complexity or high-risk features
• Perform exploratory testing to uncover issues automated tests might miss
• Validate critical customer-facing releases before production deployment
• Test new product capabilities including geospatial data processing, 3D visualization, and AI-powered features
• Conduct data quality validation for imagery and remote sensor data
• Validate engineering calculation outputs for product releases against known reference results and prior version outputs, maintaining a documented audit trail of changes across releases
• Think like the end user by understanding utility field workflows and how calculation outputs translate to real-world infrastructure decisions
• Lead by example in quality practices and testing rigor

Outcomes: Critical features and releases receive appropriate testing depth. Engineering calculation accuracy is validated and traceable across every release. Team maintains velocity during high-demand periods. Quality standards are demonstrated through personal example.

Key relationships

• SVP Product
• Product Managers and Product Owners
• QA Specialists (peer collaboration and mentorship)
• Engineering Teams (US and New Zealand)
• User Support
• Customer Success

Competencies


Competency


Demonstrated by


AI-Powered Quality Tools


Experience with AI-powered test automation and productivity tools (LLMs like ChatGPT/Claude, AI code assistants); Ability to leverage AI for test documentation, test case generation, and coverage analysis; Understanding of AI/ML testing including model validation and bias detection; Familiarity with emerging AI tools for quality assurance.


QA Leadership & Team Development


3+ years leading or managing QA teams or serving in senior/lead QA role; Proven ability to build and develop high-performing QA teams; Experience establishing quality culture and standards across organizations; Strong coaching and mentoring skills; Ability to recruit and onboard QA talent.


Quality Assurance Expertise


5+ years of quality assurance experience in software product companies; Deep knowledge of QA methodologies including functional, integration, regression, acceptance testing; Experience with both manual and automated testing approaches; Understanding of quality metrics and reporting; Knowledge of data quality testing and validation.


Engineering Calculation Validation


Ability to validate analytical and engineering calculation outputs for accuracy against known results; Familiarity with utility engineering calculations (structural analysis, load analysis, secondary voltage, or similar) strongly preferred; Understanding of how version-to-version output variance should be identified, documented, and explained.


Test Automation


Hands-on experience building and maintaining automated test frameworks; Proficiency with test automation tools (Selenium, Cypress, Playwright, SmartBear, or similar); Understanding of CI/CD integration and continuous testing; Experience with API testing and integration testing automation; Ability to define automation strategy and prioritize automation opportunities.


Agile & DevOps Practices


Strong understanding of Agile/Scrum development processes; Experience with sprint-based testing and continuous delivery; Familiarity with DevOps practices and quality gates in CI/CD pipelines; Ability to balance speed and quality in agile environments; Experience with test-driven development and behavior-driven development approaches.


Technical Aptitude


Proficiency with bug tracking and test management tools (Jira, TestRail, or similar); Understanding of software architecture and system integration; Ability to read and understand code for test automation; Experience with databases, APIs, and web technologies; Knowledge of performance testing concepts and tools.

REQUIREMENTS

Essential Qualifications:

• 3+ years leading or managing QA teams or serving as senior/lead QA role
• 5+ years of quality assurance experience in software product companies
• Deep knowledge of QA methodologies including functional, integration, regression, acceptance testing
• Hands-on experience building and maintaining automated test frameworks
• Strong understanding of Agile/Scrum development processes
• Proficiency with test automation tools (Selenium, Cypress, Playwright, SmartBear, or similar)
• Experience with AI-powered test and productivity tools (LLMs and AI code assistants)
• Experience with bug tracking and test management tools (Jira, TestRail, or similar)

• Familiarity with electric utility operations and field workflows strongly preferred
• Ability to validate engineering calculation outputs for accuracy; experience with utility engineering calculations (structural analysis, load analysis, secondary voltage, or similar) preferred

• Excellent written and verbal communication skills
• Proven ability to work effectively across time zones with distributed teams

Preferred Qualifications:

• Experience with geospatial data, GIS systems, engineering software, or mapping applications
• Knowledge of utility, telecommunications, or infrastructure industries
• Experience with data quality testing for imagery, LiDAR, or sensor data
• Knowledge of AI/ML testing including model validation and bias detection
• Experience with computer vision or image analysis quality assurance
• Familiarity with performance testing and load testing tools
• Experience in high-growth or transformation environments
• Background in both legacy system maintenance and new product development

Personal Attributes:

• Passionate advocate for quality and customer experience
• Strong ownership mentality and accountability for quality outcomes
• Collaborative leader who builds trust across teams
• Detail-oriented with systematic approach to problem-solving
• Adaptable and comfortable with ambiguity in a transforming business
• Continuous learner who stays current with QA tools and practices
• Excellent judgment in balancing thoroughness with velocity
• Effective communicator who can translate technical quality issues for diverse audiences
• Customer-focused with understanding that quality directly impacts customer success
• Results-oriented with focus on measurable quality improvements

DELEGATED AUTHORITY

• Team Lead: Authority to manage, develop, prioritize short-term activities, and long-term operations for QA team
• Quality Standards: Authority to establish and maintain quality standards and testing methodologies
• Tool Selection: Authority to recommend and implement QA tools and frameworks within approved budgets
• Test Planning: Authority to define test strategies and prioritize testing activities
• Release Quality: Authority to escalate quality concerns and recommend release readiness decisions

PHYSICAL DEMANDS AND WORK ENVIRONMENT

• This position requires working at a computer terminal either standing or sitting for the entire workday
• Ability to travel as needed (5-10% travel for company meetings, conferences, and team collaboration)
• Hybrid work environment based in Broomfield, Colorado with flexible work arrangements per company policy
• Occasional coordination with New Zealand-based teams may require flexibility in work hours

The above is intended to describe the general content of and requirements for the performance of this job. It is not to be construed as an exhaustive statement of duties, responsibilities or physical requirements. Nothing in this job description restricts management's right to assign or reassign duties and responsibilities to this job at any time. Reasonable accommodations may be made to enable individuals with disabilities to perform the essential functions.


ACKNOWLEDGEMENT


I have read the foregoing job description and understand the responsibilities of the job. I agree that I am able to perform the essential duties of this position.


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