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Salary: USD 80,000 - 100,000 / annual
LawnStarter is the nation's leading on-demand marketplace for lawn care and related services, with over $150M in annual bookings, expanding into a one-stop shop for all home services.
You will be LawnStarter's first Principal Quality Engineer, reporting directly to the Head of Engineering. The company has already built shared quality standards, working CI/CD gates, and AI tooling, but lacks dedicated leadership to own and evolve that vision. Your role is to take ownership of the existing quality infrastructure, work collaboratively with the QA squad to improve it, and drive the state of quality engineering forward as the organization scales.
This is not a traditional QA management role on day one—you won't approve tickets or chase bug counts. Instead, you'll listen to QAs embedded across teams, understand their pain points, and lead them toward what's next. As the QA squad grows, this role could expand to include direct people management, hiring, coaching, and performance management.
Key responsibilities include:
- Owning and evolving the company-wide quality engineering roadmap and accountability framework
- Designing test strategy across the stack (unit, component, contract, API, end-to-end, mobile, non-functional testing)
- Advancing AI-native quality tooling, including AI agents and Claude Code-style capabilities for test generation, code review, and quality guidance
- Managing CI/CD infrastructure, quality gates, E2E and visual regression pipelines, performance budgets, and mobile test automation
- Building production quality signals tied to incident response and monitoring dashboards
- Providing technical mentorship to QA engineers across squads (without direct management authority initially)
Success in year one means: a clear, communicated quality vision every team understands; measurable improvements in pipeline flakiness and cost; at least one new AI-native capability shipped; and a QA squad that feels led and supported.
You are deeply hands-on across the entire test pyramid, having built and maintained component, contract, API, E2E, and performance test suites yourself. You use AI actively for quality work—generating tests, setting up agentic tooling like Claude Code or MCP workflows for on-demand test generation and code review. You are a strategic thinker who designs testing approaches based on team maturity, not a tool zealot who mandates frameworks or coverage numbers before understanding context. You are a patient teacher who also ships: you coach engineers on testing practice and run enablement sessions, but you also personally build CI pipelines and tooling. You are comfortable influencing without direct headcount authority, at least initially, and are motivated by discipline-wide technical impact. If you have prior experience hiring, coaching, and managing QA or engineering teams, that is a genuine plus.
Requirements:
- AI-native quality work experience: you already use AI to generate tests, not just autocomplete code; you've set up agentic tooling so engineers can run on-demand test generation or code review
- Deep hands-on experience building and maintaining component, contract, API, E2E, and performance test suites (not just reviewing dashboards)
- Strategic mindset: you design testing approaches based on team context and maturity, not pre-packaged processes or favorite tool stacks
- Willingness to be both a teacher and a hands-on builder: you coach engineers and run enablement, but also personally build CI pipelines and infrastructure
- Comfort with influence-without-headcount: you mentor QA engineers across squads and provide input to their managers, without direct reports initially
- Prior hiring, coaching, and performance management experience is a plus (though not required on day one)
