[Hiring] Principal Quality Engineer @LawnStarter

Role Description

You'll be LawnStarter's first Principal Quality Engineer, reporting directly to the Head of Engineering. We already have quality standards, working CI/CD gates, and AI tooling in the mix. Nobody owns the vision behind all of it, drives it forward, or leads the QA squad that keeps it running. You will.

This isn't a QA management job today. You won't spend your day approving tickets or chasing bug counts. You'll take ownership of the standards and tooling that already exist, work collaboratively with the QA squad to improve them, and keep pushing the state of quality engineering forward as the org grows.

As the QA squad grows, this role could take on direct people management of QAs, so hiring, coaching, and performance management experience is a real plus even though it's not the day-one job.

What makes this role different:

• You own and evolve the quality strategy together with the QA team, instead of building one in a vacuum or just executing someone else's.
• You have direct sponsorship from the Head of Engineering and the room to keep growing the AI-native tooling already in the mix.
• Your success is measured by how much better the whole engineering org's quality gets under your leadership, not by a headcount number.

Qualifications

• AI-native, specifically for quality work.
• A strategic thinker, not a tool zealot.
• Deeply hands-on across the whole test pyramid.
• A patient teacher who still ships.
• Comfortable owning influence without owning headcount, at least for now.

Requirements

• Strategy and vision: The company-wide quality engineering roadmap, plus a quality accountability framework.
• Test strategy across the stack: Unit, component, contract, API, end-to-end, mobile, and non-functional testing.
• AI-native quality tooling: AI agents and skills for test generation, code review, and quality guidance.
• CI/CD and test infrastructure: Required checks, quality gates, performance budgets, and mobile test automation strategy.
• Production quality signal: Tying monitoring into incident response and building actionable dashboards.
• Technical mentorship of the QA discipline: Mentoring QA engineers across every squad.

Benefits

• Base salary: $80,000–$100,000 USD annually.
• Fully remote: Deep-focus analytical work with US-facing partners.
• Flexible PTO: Measured on outcomes, not hours logged.