QA Lead

About Lokal
Lokal is India's leading vernacular hyperlocal platform, built for the next billion users across Bharat. We help millions of users discover local information, jobs, opportunities, communities, and services through regional-language experiences.
As our products and user journeys scale across multiple platforms and use cases, we're looking for a QA Lead Engineer who can take end-to-end ownership of quality and help us build a scalable, automation-first QA culture.
This is a hands-on leadership role where you will work closely with Engineering, Product, Design, and other stakeholders to ensure that quality is built into the product—not tested in only at the end.
What You'll Own
Own the overall QA strategy, test architecture, and quality standards across Lokal's consumer-facing products
Drive end-to-end quality for mobile applications across Android and iOS, along with APIs and backend integrations
Define and implement robust test strategies, test plans, release criteria, and sign-off processes for critical product journeys
Lead the design, development, and maintenance of automation frameworks and regression suites
Identify critical user journeys and progressively improve automation coverage to increase release confidence and speed
Establish effective functional, regression, exploratory, usability, localization, integration, and performance testing practices
Validate analytics, event tracking, and product instrumentation to ensure accurate data collection
Work closely with Engineering and Product teams from requirement and design stages to identify quality risks early
Own the defect lifecycle—from identification and prioritization to root-cause analysis and closure
Monitor production releases, identify quality risks proactively, and drive improvements to reduce production defects
Integrate automated testing into CI/CD pipelines and improve the overall release process
Requirements
6+ years of experience in Quality Assurance / Software Testing, with experience leading QA initiatives or teams
Strong hands-on experience testing B2C consumer-facing mobile applications
Strong understanding of QA methodologies, test strategy, software development lifecycle, and release management
Belief that adoption of technology can increase output and speed of QA instead of more people
Proven experience building or scaling mobile automation frameworks using tools such as Appium, Maestro, Detox, or equivalent
Hands-on scripting/programming experience in JavaScript, Python, or SQL
Strong debugging, analytical, and root-cause analysis skills
Experience defining quality metrics and improving release quality
Ability to independently drive QA initiatives and influence engineering and product decisions
Strong communication and stakeholder-management skills
Good to Have
Experience with tools such as Firebase, Sentry, Charles Proxy, or equivalent
Experience with performance, load, or reliability testing of Mobile apps
Experience testing products with multiple languages/localization requirements
Experience working with analytics and event-tracking systems
Experience mentoring and developing QA engineers
Familiarity with Agile/Scrum environments
Experience working in high-growth consumer technology or product companies
What Success Looks Like
Critical user journeys have strong and reliable automated regression coverage
Production defects are consistently reduced through proactive quality practices
Releases become faster and more predictable without compromising product quality
QA is involved early in the product development lifecycle rather than only during release testing
Automation and CI/CD significantly improve release confidence
Quality metrics provide clear visibility into product and release health
Engineering, Product, and QA teams operate with a shared quality-first mindset
The QA function evolves into a scalable, engineering-driven quality practice as Lokal grows
Why Join Lokal?
At Lokal, you'll have the opportunity to influence quality across products used by millions of users across Bharat
You'll work in a fast-moving product environment where ownership, speed, experimentation, and customer experience matter. As the QA Lead Engineer, you'll have the opportunity to shape our testing architecture, automation strategy, release processes, and overall quality culture from the ground up

Work arrangement
No