# Quality Engineering Lead - Company: [Element451]() - Location: Belgrade, Serbia - Remote: Yes - Team: Engineering - Employment type: Full Time - Posted: July 17, 2026 ## Job description Element451 is building the AI-powered platform reshaping how colleges and universities recruit, enroll, and support their students — and quality is how we earn the trust of the institutions that run on us. This is a rare chance to own and build a modern quality system end to end: set the strategy, build the team and infrastructure that deliver it, and lead how a high-performing engineering org bakes quality in across the full lifecycle. If you want to shape a discipline rather than inherit one — and you believe quality engineering is being reinvented by AI right now — you’ll feel at home here. ## The Role You’ll own quality engineering at Element451 — the strategy, the system, and the team that delivers it. This is a player-coach role: most of your time goes to leading — managing and growing a team of quality engineers, setting quality strategy across the full SDLC, and building the systems, tooling, and practices that make it real — and you stay hands-on in the testing itself, because you can’t curate a quality system you’ve stopped practicing. Quality here is an enablement function, not a gate. Your team isn’t the bug-finder of last resort between engineering and release; you build the personas, journeys, infrastructure, agents, and signals that let every engineer hit a high bar themselves. It’s also an explicitly AI-forward role: we expect you to bring thought leadership on how agentic AI reshapes quality work and to operationalize it across your team. ## What You’ll Own You own the quality system across the full lifecycle — from refinement and design through automation, release, and production. Quality isn’t a phase you run before launch; it’s a property the whole org builds in, and you own the system that makes it possible. In practice, you: * Set and own quality strategy across the full SDLC — shift-left into refinement and design, define release-quality signals, and lead production escape analysis. * Lead, manage, and grow the quality engineering team — hire, coach, set standards, and develop QEs into force multipliers for the engineers they partner with. * Build and curate the quality system — the persona and journey model, the end-to-end automation suite, the test observability layer (flake, escape, time-to-feedback, coverage), and the shared tooling developers rely on — as a living product your team delivers. * Make quality measurable and legible — define the metrics that matter and the dashboards that surface them. * Champion agentic AI across the practice — pilot and scale AI-assisted test generation and agent-based testing, own the evaluation discipline for our AI features, and set the human-in-the-loop governance that holds AI-assisted work to the same bar as anything written by hand. * Stay hands-on — design and write tests on high-risk work, set patterns by example, and keep your technical depth current. * Partner across Engineering and Product as the owner of the quality discipline — drive cross-cutting initiatives and represent quality in how the org plans and ships. ## How You’ll Show Up We hire for behavior as much as for experience. We’re looking for someone who: * Lives our values, and builds team culture through behavior, not policy. * Leads as a force multiplier — measures success by the org’s quality outcomes and the engineers the system makes better, not by the bugs they personally find. * Is excellent by default, and holds the quality system to a higher standard than the minimum. * Leads with service — treats developer enablement as core to the job. * Puts the team and product first — partners with engineering and product rather than positioning quality as a separate gate. * Communicates with clarity and honesty — surfaces signal and risk proactively. * Treats feedback as a gift, and gives it to the team generously and well. ## What You Bring * 7+ years in quality engineering, including proven experience leading quality practices, teams, or processes in a complex, multi-tenant SaaS product. * Experience managing and growing engineers — hiring, coaching, setting standards, and developing a team that delivers. * Strong, current hands-on engineering skills — you write and review production-quality test code and build tooling. Quality engineering here is a building role, and the Lead is no exception. * A track record owning a quality system across the full SDLC — persona- and journey-based E2E strategy, test observability, release quality, and shift-left practices. * Practical depth with modern test automation; Playwright or comparable browser automation is highly relevant, and contract testing (Pact-style) is a plus. * The ability to own quality for our AI features — prompt evaluation, golden datasets, hallucination and safety testing, output regression — and to stand that discipline up quickly. Direct experience is a strong plus; the requirement is the judgment and engineering ability to build it. * Genuine thought leadership in agentic AI for quality — current, hands-on fluency with agentic tooling across the quality lifecycle, and a point of view on operationalizing and governing it. We’re a Cursor shop; Claude Code, Codex, or comparable tools are equally valued. * Comfort with the quality-as-system-owner, enablement-not-gate framing. If your prior orgs treated QA as the gate, this role will feel different — and that difference is the point. * Excellent written communication — strategy docs, playbooks, and standards that stand on their own. ## **Our Values** * **Impactful not Immediate** - We prioritize and invest in initiatives that will be most impactful. * **Progress before Perfection** - We are action-oriented people. We are empowered to make decisions and achieve our goals. * **Learners before Masters** - We are curious and humble people who strive to constantly improve. * **Together not Alone** - We rally behind each other and pitch in to support the greater whole. * **Customer Success not Support** - We solve partner goals and prioritize their success. ## Our Interview Process Our process is rigorous and designed to be real signal — for you and for us. Expect live, interactive technical and leadership assessment with our engineers and leaders, not take-home busywork or trivia. You’ll show how you think about a quality system, how you lead a team, and how you apply and govern AI tooling in real time. We move quickly for the right people and give you a clear view of the bar before you accept. ## Apply [Apply on Element451]() Canonical job page: