Lead QA Team Lead Resume Example for QA Team Leadership, AI-Assisted Test Planning & Release Readiness

Led QA team delivery, full testing lifecycle ownership, AI-assisted QA initiatives, release readiness, direct report management, product feature support, and cross-functional quality leadership across SaaS applications.

• Owned the full testing lifecycle for SaaS product features from requirement review and test planning through execution, defect triage, UAT support, release sign-off, and post-release validation across 30+ release cycles.
• Led a 6-person QA team across sprint testing, regression execution, exploratory testing, automation handoff, release readiness, and production smoke testing, improving deployment confidence across Agile delivery teams.
• Drove QA initiatives introducing Playwright record-and-playback workflows, Playwright Codegen, AI agent-assisted test case generation, and reusable test documentation patterns, reducing manual test design effort by 30%.
• Served as subject matter expert for core product features, partnering with product managers, engineers, designers, and support teams to clarify expected behavior, business rules, edge cases, and release risks.
• Conducted recurring 1:1s with direct reports to review workload, career goals, testing quality, blockers, team concerns, and performance expectations, improving team engagement and accountability.
• Resolved team conflicts and quality concerns by facilitating issue discussions, clarifying ownership, aligning expectations, and escalating delivery risks before they impacted release timelines.
• Pushed back on unrealistic testing timelines by presenting scope, risk, regression impact, test coverage gaps, and defect trends to product and engineering leadership, improving release decision quality.
• Served as backup QA manager for sprint planning, resource allocation, stakeholder updates, release readiness meetings, defect escalation, executive QA status reporting, and cross-team delivery coordination.
• Standardized QA delivery workflows using Jira, Azure DevOps Test Plans, TestRail, and Confluence, improving test execution visibility and reducing missed regression coverage by 35%.
• Implemented AI-assisted QA workflows using ChatGPT, Claude, GitHub Copilot, Cursor, and AI agents to generate test scenarios, summarize defects, identify edge cases, and improve test coverage reviews.
• Established release readiness dashboards tracking test execution progress, open defects, blocker aging, defect severity, regression status, escaped defect trends, and QA sign-off risks across Agile teams.

Supported QA operations, functional testing, regression testing, defect lifecycle management, and release validation across enterprise SaaS platforms.

• Executed functional testing, regression testing, exploratory testing, and release validation across enterprise web application environments, improving sprint-level defect detection and release quality.
• Documented and triaged software defects in Jira and Azure DevOps, improving issue clarity, reproduction quality, severity assignment, and engineering turnaround time.
• Collaborated with Agile teams on sprint testing, QA coordination, UAT support, production smoke testing, and release validation to reduce escaped defects and improve deployment readiness.
• Identified workflow, usability, and business rule issues through exploratory testing, helping product and engineering teams resolve customer-facing quality risks earlier in the release cycle.
• Supported QA planning, test case management, regression scope definition, and release support activities across staging and production environments, improving QA execution consistency.