General QA Lead (Manual + Automation)

Eligibility: Permanent location in the EU or Ukraine is required. We can only consider candidates legally based in the EU or Ukraine.

Join Söderberg & Partners Heartpace AB, a Swedish product company building reliable, high-quality software for the European market. We’re looking for a General QA Lead to lead our General QA team and drive quality across manual and automation testing.

This role is for someone who can combine strong QA expertise with leadership, structure, and ownership. You will guide the team, improve QA processes, support delivery, and ensure that our products are released with confidence.

We’re not looking for someone who only manages tasks or runs checklists. We’re looking for a QA leader who can build a strong QA team, create scalable testing practices, improve release confidence, and balance manual testing, automation, quality strategy, and delivery speed.

What you’ll do

• Lead the General QA team, including planning, coordination, mentoring, and day-to-day QA leadership.
• Own QA strategy and execution across manual and automation testing.
• Set quality standards, testing approaches, and best practices for the QA team.
• Support QA engineers in test planning, test design, automation, risk analysis, and defect management.
• Coordinate QA work across product teams to ensure clear priorities, coverage, and release readiness.
• Improve QA processes across the SDLC, including faster feedback loops, clearer release criteria, and better defect prevention.
• Create, review, and maintain test plans, checklists, test cases, and QA documentation in TestRail and Confluence.
• Lead manual testing activities, including exploratory, regression, acceptance, and risk-based testing.
• Lead automation initiatives using Playwright + TypeScript, including:
  • scalable automation architecture
  • Page Object / fixtures / reusable utilities
  • CI-friendly execution
  • meaningful reporting
  • reducing flakiness
  • improving maintainability
• Ensure proper API testing coverage using Postman and support API test automation where applicable.
• Collaborate with developers, product managers, designers, and leadership to clarify requirements and ensure test coverage.
• Track and communicate QA metrics, risks, defect trends, automation progress, and release readiness.
• Report, track, and verify defects in Jira with clear reproduction steps, severity, priority, and business impact.
• Drive continuous improvement within the QA team and across engineering workflows.
• Use AI tools to improve test design, documentation, automation, analysis, and repetitive QA workflows while keeping security and quality standards intact.

We value

• Team leadership: ability to guide, support, and grow QA engineers.
• Ownership: taking responsibility for quality outcomes, not just QA activities.
• High performance / results-first: measurable impact over process for its own sake.
• Systems thinking: improving how quality is built across teams.
• Data-driven decisions: using risks, metrics, and evidence to guide priorities.
• Fast execution with integrity: speed, reliability, and transparency.
• Continuous improvement: better processes, stronger automation, better releases.

You’ll thrive here if you…

• Enjoy leading a QA team while staying close to the practical work.
• Can turn ambiguity into clear QA plans, priorities, and ownership.
• Know how to balance manual testing, automation, risk, and delivery speed.
• Can mentor QA engineers and raise the overall quality standard.
• Prefer short cycles: ship → measure → improve.
• Care about outcomes over process theater.
• Enjoy building systems that help teams release faster and with more confidence.

What we’re looking for

Must-have

• 6+ years of QA experience in web application testing, including both manual and automation testing.
• Previous experience as a QA Lead, QA Team Lead, Senior QA Engineer, or similar role.
• Experience leading, mentoring, or coordinating QA engineers.
• Strong hands-on experience with test automation, preferably using Playwright + TypeScript.
• Experience designing and maintaining scalable automation frameworks.
• Strong manual testing expertise, including exploratory, regression, acceptance, and risk-based testing.
• Experience defining QA strategy, test plans, release criteria, and QA processes.
• Confident with Postman, TestRail, Jira, and Confluence.
• Solid understanding of SDLC, Agile/Scrum, and quality practices in modern product teams.
• Understanding of client-server architecture.
• Web fundamentals: HTML, CSS, HTTP, Ajax, JSON.
• Strong analytical skills, attention to detail, and clear communication.
• Ability to influence cross-functional teams and communicate quality risks clearly.
• Leadership mindset with strong ownership and accountability.
• English: Upper-Intermediate+.

Nice-to-have

• Experience managing a distributed QA team.
• Experience introducing or improving QA processes across multiple teams.
• Experience building automation strategy from scratch.
• Experience with CI/CD pipelines and test execution in build/release workflows.
• Swedish, conversational/professional or native.
• Ukrainian/Russian, as it helps with part of the team.
• Practical AI usage for QA, workflow automation, documentation, and test design.

Interview process

1. Screening interview with the Recruiter
2. Leadership and technical interview with the Tech Lead / Engineering representative
3. Practical discussion or live task focused on QA strategy, team leadership, automation approach, and testing scenarios
4. Final approval interview with the CTO

Why join us?

At Söderberg & Partners Heartpace AB, quality is not a gate at the end — it is a system we build across the full product lifecycle.

As a General QA Lead, you will lead the General QA team, shape how we test and automate, improve release confidence, and help build stronger quality practices across engineering. You’ll have ownership, influence, and the opportunity to make the QA function more scalable, proactive, and impactful.

Ready to join?

Apply now and help us build reliable products, a strong QA team, and better release confidence.