Principal Quality Engineer
This position is listed on behalf of a partner company, who manages all applications and next steps. Our partner is looking for a Principal Quality Engineer based in Brazil.
Join a growing engineering organization that is investing in scalable quality practices, advanced automation, and AI-powered testing. As the first Principal Quality Engineer, you will define and evolve the company-wide quality engineering strategy while building on existing standards, tools, and CI/CD infrastructure. You will collaborate with QA engineers and cross-functional teams to improve testing practices, strengthen release confidence, and embed quality throughout the software development lifecycle. A key focus will be expanding AI-native quality tooling, optimizing test pipelines, and improving production monitoring and reliability. This is a highly influential, hands-on technical leadership role with direct sponsorship from engineering leadership and significant autonomy to drive continuous improvement. As the organization grows, the position may also evolve to include direct management of the QA team.
Accountabilities
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Define and maintain the company-wide quality engineering roadmap, establishing clear standards and a shared vision for testing, automation, and software reliability.
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Develop a quality accountability framework that clarifies the responsibilities of engineers, engineering managers, and product managers throughout the software development lifecycle.
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Establish adaptable testing strategies across unit, component, contract, API, end-to-end, mobile, performance, load, and accessibility testing, tailoring approaches to each team's maturity and product needs.
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Evolve AI-powered quality engineering capabilities, including agent-based workflows and tools for automated test generation, code review, and on-demand quality guidance.
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Research, experiment with, and evaluate emerging AI technologies and testing approaches, identifying opportunities to improve engineering productivity and software quality.
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Own the evolution of CI/CD quality infrastructure, including required checks, release gates, end-to-end testing pipelines, visual regression testing, performance budgets, and mobile automation across emulators and real-device environments.
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Optimize testing pipelines by reducing flaky tests, managing infrastructure costs, improving execution speed, and determining which checks should block deployments versus run asynchronously.
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Strengthen production quality signals by integrating monitoring with incident response and developing actionable dashboards that help teams detect and resolve issues.
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Provide technical leadership and mentorship to QA engineers across teams, sharing best practices, delivering enablement sessions, and supporting consistent quality standards.
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Collaborate with engineering managers to communicate QA engineers' technical development and performance-related feedback while respecting existing reporting structures.
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Turn quality improvements into planned, measurable engineering work rather than leaving them as secondary responsibilities for individual teams.
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Measure the impact of quality initiatives through clear indicators, including pipeline reliability, test efficiency, AI-tool adoption, and improvements in engineering outcomes.
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Document and communicate quality standards, technical decisions, and reusable practices so successful approaches can be adopted across the organization.
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Potentially take on direct people-management responsibilities as the QA organization expands, including hiring, coaching, and performance management.
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Extensive experience in quality engineering, software testing, and test automation, with the technical depth and strategic judgment expected of a principal-level individual contributor.
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Hands-on experience using AI tools for quality engineering, including automated test generation and AI-assisted code review in real production environments.
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Experience building or configuring agent-based workflows, such as Claude Code or MCP-based integrations, that enable engineers to run testing and quality checks on demand.
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Strong practical expertise across the testing pyramid, including component, contract, API, end-to-end, and performance testing, with experience building and maintaining the associated test suites.
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Proven ability to design, implement, and troubleshoot CI/CD pipelines, automated quality gates, test infrastructure, and release validation workflows.
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Knowledge of mobile test automation, visual regression testing, performance budgets, accessibility testing, and testing across emulators and real-device environments.
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Experience with monitoring, observability, incident response, and production quality metrics, with the ability to translate technical signals into actionable improvements.
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Strategic and adaptable approach to quality engineering, including the ability to assess team maturity and select appropriate practices without imposing arbitrary coverage targets or preferred tools.
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Strong understanding of software development processes and the ways testing, automation, and quality assurance integrate into the full development lifecycle.
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Demonstrated ability to lead through technical influence rather than relying on formal authority, including mentoring QA engineers and collaborating with engineering managers and product teams.
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Excellent communication and teaching skills, with experience explaining testing concepts, coaching engineers, and facilitating technical enablement sessions.
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Willingness to remain hands-on by personally developing tooling, improving infrastructure, and resolving complex testing and deployment issues.
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Continuous-improvement mindset, with the ability to evaluate emerging technologies, run experiments, and scale solutions that demonstrate measurable value.
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Comfort working autonomously, documenting decisions, collaborating across distributed teams, and balancing strategic planning with practical implementation.
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Previous experience hiring, coaching, or managing QA or engineering teams is an advantage, particularly for potential future people-management responsibilities.
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Motivated by improving the quality and effectiveness of the entire engineering organization rather than focusing solely on headcount growth or release approvals.
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Competitive annual base salary of USD $80,000–$100,000.
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Fully remote work arrangement, with flexibility to work from anywhere in Brazil.
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Flexible paid time off, with an emphasis on results and outcomes rather than hours logged.
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High-impact technical leadership opportunity with direct sponsorship from engineering leadership.
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Significant autonomy to shape quality engineering strategy, tooling, and best practices across the organization.
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Opportunity to work with AI-powered development and testing tools and help advance modern quality engineering practices.
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Hands-on technical challenges involving automation, CI/CD infrastructure, software reliability, and scalable testing.
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Potential career growth into direct QA team management as the organization and its quality engineering function expand.