Software Quality Assurance Lead

Test Automation, Performance & AI-Assisted Testing Location: Abu Dhabi, UAE Working arrangement: Onsite Reports to: Head of Engineering / Head of Quality Assurance About Us ICAN is a management consultancy connecting organizations with experienced professionals across strategy, transformation, technology and people advisory. We work with public and private sector clients to identify and deploy talent that supports their business priorities. About the Role This is a hands-on technical leadership role for someone who can build reliable automation frameworks, diagnose performance issues and lead a team of quality engineers. You will own quality engineering across platforms built on JavaScript and TypeScript, covering user interfaces, APIs, data and integrations. Your responsibilities will span Playwright automation, performance engineering and AI-assisted testing, including workflows where AI agents generate, execute and maintain tests. You will work closely with engineering, product and platform teams from the design stage, ensuring that testing reflects how the systems are built, where they could fail and how they need to perform. About the Responsibilities Lead the overall quality assurance strategy across web applications, APIs, integrations and distributed systems. Design, build and maintain scalable automated testing frameworks using Playwright, TypeScript and JavaScript. Own performance, load and stress testing using k6 or JMeter, identifying bottlenecks and improving system reliability. Integrate automated testing into CI/CD pipelines, establishing quality gates, reporting and monitoring. Introduce AI-powered and agentic testing solutions to improve test coverage, execution and maintenance. Collaborate with software developers, architects and DevOps teams to identify risks, resolve defects and improve product quality. Lead, mentor and develop the QA engineering team, establishing standards, best practices and continuous improvement. About You 8+ years of experience in software testing and quality engineering, including 3+ years leading automation or quality engineering teams. Expert knowledge of TypeScript, JavaScript and Node.js, including asynchronous programming, typing and maintainable framework design. Deep, hands-on experience building and owning Playwright frameworks, including scaling execution within CI/CD. At least 2 years of hands-on performance engineering experience with k6 or JMeter, covering workload design, scripts built from scratch, results analysis and delivery of performance improvements. Experience should extend beyond running existing scripts. A strong understanding of infrastructure and its impact on performance, including cloud platforms, containers, Kubernetes, load balancers, databases, indexing, caching, queues, connection pools and networking. Practical experience using observability tools to identify root causes during test runs. Experience with Jest or Vitest, JavaScript API testing, and Pact or equivalent contract testing tools. A solid understanding of distributed systems, microservices, REST, GraphQL, message queues and event streaming. The ability to read architecture diagrams and code, assess technical risks and challenge design decisions with evidence. Experience with CI/CD platforms such as GitHub Actions, Azure DevOps or Jenkins, alongside Docker and test environment automation. Practical experience applying LLMs or AI agents to testing, with a clear understanding of their capabilities and limitations. Strong communication skills and the ability to work credibly with senior developers, architects and platform engineers. English speaking is mandatory, Arabic speaking is preferred. For more information, please visit www.icanmena.com. Show more Show less