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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'll be LawnStarter's first Principal Quality Engineer, reporting directly to the Head of Engineering. The company has already established shared quality standards, working CI/CD gates, and AI tooling, but lacks dedicated leadership to own and evolve that vision. Currently, every QA engineer is heads-down on their own team with no bandwidth to drive standards forward, unify practices, or push the state of the art. This role fills that gap.
This is not a traditional QA management job on day one. You won't spend time approving tickets or chasing bug counts. Instead, you'll take ownership of existing standards and tooling, work collaboratively with the QA squad to improve them, and keep pushing quality engineering forward as the organization grows. As the QA squad scales, this role could evolve to include direct people management of QAs.
You'll own the company-wide quality engineering roadmap and a quality accountability framework that defines what engineers, EMs, and PMs each own at every stage. You'll design test strategy across the stack (unit, component, contract, API, end-to-end, mobile, and non-functional testing), evolve AI-native quality tooling including AI agents and Claude Code-style capabilities that engineers can run on demand, and manage CI/CD infrastructure and test pipelines. You'll tie production monitoring into incident response, build dashboards teams actually use, and provide technical mentorship to QA engineers across every squad—mentoring on craft and discipline while their EMs handle day-to-day management and career growth.
Success in year one means: a clear, communicated quality vision every product team understands; measurable improvements to existing gates (flakiness, pipeline cost, sync vs. async execution); at least one new AI-native capability shipped that engineers use weekly; and a QA squad that feels led with concrete improvements to their work, tools, and standards.
You're not starting from zero or inheriting a mess. The job is to listen to QAs who live in this daily, understand where the pain is, and lead them toward what's next—not to invent a strategy nobody has thought about or parachute in with a pre-packaged process.
REQUIREMENTS:
- AI-native quality work experience: you already use AI to generate tests, not just autocomplete code. You've set up agentic tooling like Claude Code or MCP-based workflows so engineers can run on-demand test generation or code review, and you keep experimenting with what AI can take off a team's plate next.
- Strategic thinking, not tool zealotry: you design testing approaches that fit a team's current maturity level, not the one you used at your last job. You resist mandating specific frameworks or coverage numbers before understanding context.
- Deeply hands-on across the test pyramid: you've built and maintained component, contract, API, E2E, and performance test suites yourself, not just reviewed slides. You step in when engineering teams are blocked by pipeline issues.
- Patient teacher who ships: coaching engineers on testing practice and running enablement sessions is part of the job, as is personally building CI pipelines and tooling. You don't write docs and hope someone else implements them.
- Comfortable with influence without headcount, at least initially: you'll mentor QA engineers across squads on technical craft and send notes to their EMs for performance reviews. You won't be their manager on day one. This works if you're motivated by discipline-wide technical influence. Prior experience hiring, coaching, and managing performance for QA or engineering teams is a genuine plus, as this role could grow into managing the QA squad directly.
