Staff QA Software Engineer

About the Role

We're looking for a QA Lead to join OpenMined, a nonprofit on a mission to build the public network for the world's non-public data — unlocking 1,000,000x more information across every scientific field and industry, and ensuring it stays open, equitable, and accessible to all.

Our engineering team is brilliant and mission-driven, and we are looking for someone to join it who can collaborate across teams to build our quality function from the ground up. Our products are gaining customer traction and we strive to ensure reliability, security, and data integrity.

This is not a traditional QA role. You won't sit in a separate team writing test scripts against specs. You'll be embedded with engineers — pairing on test design, reviewing architecture for testability, building frameworks and tooling, and creating the habits that make quality a natural part of how every engineer works. You'll set the organizational quality strategy: what gets tested, how deeply, at what layer, and what constitutes "done."

The right person for this role is an engineer who chose to specialize in quality — someone who can read a codebase, identify the riskiest surfaces, design a testing strategy, write the tests, build the framework, and teach others to do the same. You earn credibility by contributing code and finding real bugs, not by writing policies and expecting compliance.

If you're energized by building something from nothing, teaching through doing, and making an entire engineering organization better at shipping reliable software — we'd love to hear from you.

Responsibilities

• Own the delivery of engineering’s quarterly goals, ensuring consistent, high-impact delivery while effectively managing resources.
• Work collaboratively in each product team’s codebase to access current test coverage, highest-risk surfaces, and its production readiness gap to produce a prioritized testing roadmap that engineers can see and execute against.
• Establish testing patterns for a multi-language stack, implementing frameworks that make testing as easy as writing features.
• Establish and socialize quality policies, minimum quality gates, and production-readiness standards collaboratively and iteratively with the product teams.
• Spend regular time within each team’s workflow, pair on test design for complex features, review PRs for test quality, and making testing collaborative, not imposed.
• Build and own what runs inside the CI/CD pipeline quality gates (testing suites, linting rules, reporting) supported by the Platform Lead.
• Build automated PR checks and contributor CI gates to prepare for open-source contribution quality management.
• Champion high-quality software delivery through the establishment of robust tools, processes, & methodologies, and by providing hands-on technical leadership via individual development contributions and code reviews.
• Create technical documentation and processes that support high velocity and knowledge transfer.

Requirements

• 5+ years of professional software engineering experience demonstrating capabilities to operate as an engineering peer within squads, not just as a testing specialist.
• Python proficiency required; TypeScript and Go strongly preferred to ensure cross-team codebase understanding and ability to contribute beyond just test suites.
• Has integrated testing frameworks from zero in at least two ecosystems.
• Has defined quality standards and production-readiness criteria for an engineering organization.
• Fluency integrating CI/CD quality gates into engineering workflows to encourage adoption and sustained use.
• Has introduced testing culture to one or more teams in order to establish a teams capabilities and best practices.
• Located within ET +/- 1 to enable rapid team-oriented communication, learning, and feedback cycles as well as facilitate engagement with remainder of OpenMined engineering team, globally.