WHAT DOES A LEAD QA ENGINEER DO?

Published: Jan 15, 2026 - The Lead QA Engineer drives test planning, functional verification, regression coverage, and release validation by collaborating with Product and Engineering teams to ensure workflows and use cases are fully understood. This role manages QA operations by leading engineers, coordinating exploratory and automated testing efforts, tracking defect trends, and improving processes through continuous evaluation. The lead also strengthens overall product quality by integrating external QA resources, optimizing tools and methodologies, and maintaining an up-to-date testing strategy.

A Review of Professional Skills and Functions for Lead QA Engineer

1. Lead QA Engineer Duties

  • Team Management: Managing the QA team and defining both planning and tasks
  • Bug Prioritization: Responsible for prioritizing bugs and working with production teams
  • Mobile Testing: Testing quality on various mobile devices as an expert in games (iOS/Android)
  • Feature Quality: Responsible for the quality of current and upcoming features within the game portfolio over the whole development cycle
  • Issue Ownership: Being the point of contact for all arising quality issues
  • Process Design: Conception and continuous update of the testing process
  • QA Leadership: Leading areas of QA such as regression, retesting, or Live QA, or an area of specialization, e.g., network/events for the team
  • Bug Burndown: Creating and managing daily bug burndowns from high-quality data using dashboards, filters, and processes
  • Server Testing: Understanding client and server testing, including server validation, mobile DLC, and experiments/events

2. Lead QA Engineer Details

  • Automation Ownership: Deliver quality through automated testing by taking ownership of the design, development, and execution of the test automation
  • Code Collaboration: Design, write, review, and test code in a collaborative environment
  • Result Analysis: Monitor, consolidate, analyze, debug, and communicate automation test results
  • Data Creation: Create and manufacture test data for execution or database population
  • Tool Development: Build tools to support automated testing of products
  • Time Estimation: Provide accurate time estimates and communication
  • Regression Testing: Participate in regression testing
  • Test Maintenance: Develop proper automated regression tests and maintain the existing regression test bed
  • Impact Identification: Identify impacted features and ensure affected tests are properly executed
  • Release Testing: Participate in off-hours release testing and ensure the release is properly deployed to production
  • Issue Documentation: Work with customers and stakeholders to document issues reported by the end users
  • Quality Input: Provide input on issues that impact quality, system stability, and performance
  • Patch Verification: Work with the teams to test the fixes for patch releases

3. Lead QA Engineer Responsibilities

  • Test Leadership: Perform the role of test lead on an agile squad
  • Selenium Automation: Develop, maintain and execute automated tests using Selenium
  • Framework Development: Lead overall QA activities by contributing to and developing sophisticated automation frameworks that are efficient, flexible and reusable
  • Issue Resolution: Find solutions to blocking issues and problems
  • CI/CD Integration: Integrate test case execution with the CI/CD pipeline to better align with the DevOps strategy
  • Cross Collaboration: Partner with cross-functional team members, business analysts, developers and management to build and refine test strategy
  • Testability Influence: Influence the team to design and build for testability
  • Criteria Contribution: Contribute to acceptance criteria, requirements and user stories
  • Report Automation: Create automated reports on test execution and status
  • Test Design: Contribute to the test design for different types of testing - Visual, Functional and End-to-end testing

4. Lead QA Engineer Accountabilities

  • Test Strategy: Establish test strategy, analyze, design and develop automated and manual test suites to perform integration testing, acceptance testing, and end-to-end functional testing
  • Script Development: Design and develop test automation scripts, using current test automation guidelines and best practices
  • Scenario Setup: Collaborate with the Project Manager and Technical Analysts to set up test scenarios and cases that work to ensure that the acceptance criteria of user stories are met
  • Issue Diagnosis: Work with Software Engineers to diagnose issues and enhance solutions
  • Bug Verification: Record test results, report and verify software bug fixes to accept automation criteria
  • Performance Analysis: Analyze performance test requirements and develop test plans and debug to understand test objective requirements
  • Performance Testing: Handle performance testing and present results for validation and analysis to the development team
  • Defect Tracking: Prepare software defect tracking and report defect statuses to stakeholders
  • QA Metrics: Track quality assurance metrics, like defect densities and open defect counts
  • Automation Practices: Keep up with the latest best practices in Test Automation

5. Lead QA Engineer Functions

  • Framework Design: Envision, design and implement a performance test framework and architecture at the enterprise level
  • Performance Ownership: Responsible for all performance testing/engineering activities across the organization and owns the outcome of performance testing and engineering
  • CoE Leadership: Drive the performance of CoE and establish performance test and engineering best practices across the company
  • KPI Establishment: Establish performance test goals, measurements, metrics and KPIs on the browser side, server side (cloud and on premises)
  • Stakeholder Collaboration: Effectively collaborate with stakeholders from Development, Product Owner and Enterprise Architecture teams
  • Resource Management: Manage the day-to-day work of the vendor and Advance’s staff PT/PE resources
  • Leadership Communication: Clearly and effectively communicate with Senior leadership on a weekly/monthly basis
  • Result Review: Review performance test results with architects and development leads
  • Improvement Recommendations: Providing performance improvement recommendations to development teams based on test results
  • Issue Analysis: Analyze production issues by coordinating with production support teams to identify performance issues and ensure the findings are fed back to the PT script creation process

6. Lead QA Engineer Overview

  • Process Creation: Create processes for reporting testing progress and software quality
  • Release Management: Manage software build and release plans and processes
  • Quality Oversight: Manage quality processes throughout the SDLC
  • Lab Maintenance: Maintain lab systems and test data repository
  • PT Planning: Manage a per-release PT plan
  • Script Review: Review, evaluate, and document existing PT script code, processes and contributors
  • Environment Evaluation: Review, evaluate, and document dedicated/shared/contributed hardware testing environments
  • Priority Correlation: Correlate areas of focus and prioritize testing methodologies based on prior areas of concern and areas of current/future development focus
  • Methodology Authoring: Author, with collaborative buy-in from all parties, a practical methodology for testing
  • Future Planning: Put together a plan for future testing, including areas for development, hardware/lab requirements, and staffing requirements, to obtain specific results

7. Lead QA Engineer Details and Accountabilities

  • Response Strategy: Develop response strategies and processes for high-criticality and security vulnerability-related defect notifications
  • Emergency Testing: Develop a testing strategy for emergency and maintenance releases
  • Performance Program: Develop a program for load and performance testing of systems and incorporate it into the overall testing process
  • Bug Analysis: Review historical, existing and ongoing bug reports to identify areas needing specific attention
  • Release Alignment: Liaison with the Program Manager and individual Systems Development Managers to ensure delivery of a high-quality product is compatible with release timeline targets
  • Resource Communication: Build relationships with QA and development teams to facilitate communication of resource needs (personnel and labs)
  • Testing Coordination: Coordinate testing efforts, continual process improvement, and thorough end-to-end testing of cross-platform changes within the QA Center of Excellence to support and encourage the growth of individuals within the QA discipline
  • Team Mentoring: Share ideas and issues across QA teams, and contribute to training and mentoring opportunities

8. Lead QA Engineer Tasks

  • Requirement Verification: Verify contractual and regulatory requirements are fulfilled and have maximized customer satisfaction and profitability
  • Quality Planning: Establish and execute a project quality plan, witness points, and quality records for compliance with the contract
  • Experience Feedback: Ensure customer quality requirements and Feedback of Experience (FOE)/Lessons Learned are taken into account in the tender proposal to avoid deviation and improve execution processes
  • Strategic Execution: Utilizes in-depth knowledge of a discipline and analytical thinking to execute policy and strategy
  • Team Support: Acts as a resource for colleagues with less experience
  • Process Improvement: Lead local improvement projects and be part of global GE projects and initiatives
  • Team Consensus: Explains information, developing skills to bring team members to a consensus around topics within the field
  • Expectation Management: Conveys performance expectations and may handle sensitive issues
  • Procedure Modification: Allows modification of procedures and practices covering work as long as the results meet standards of acceptability
  • Solution Proposal: Uses judgment and can propose different solutions outside of set parameters to address more complicated day-to-day problems
  • Data Prioritization: Prioritize information for data analysis
  • Analytical Thinking: Uses technical experience and analytical thinking
  • Decision Support: Uses multiple internal and limited external sources outside of their own team to arrive at decisions

9. Lead QA Engineer Roles

  • Stakeholder Liaison: Liaising with key stakeholders and helping them understand the quality approach for new features and applications, whether by hosting demos or presenting test strategies
  • Roadmap Support: Supporting BAs to build a roadmap with clear milestones and dependencies
  • Milestone Alignment: Working with teams to align on delivery against those milestones
  • Cross-Domain Collaboration: Building relationships across commercial tech and helping shape ways of working and test approaches for large-scale cross-domain projects
  • Team Leadership: Leading team to bring out the best in all team members, aligning responsibilities with strengths and career goals, seeking high engagement, performance, and retention
  • Risk Mitigation: Improving the speed of delivery whilst also mitigating risk to current processes and live systems
  • Strategy Guidance: Helping the QA Engineers in CPO teams with their test strategies to ensure testing happens early, continuously, and is owned at the right level
  • Path Automation: Automating and easing the path for code to production
  • Team Operations: Driving the day-to-day operations, monitoring, and maintenance of the team to ensure reliable, predictable, and efficient service

10. Lead QA Engineer Additional Details

  • Use Case Analysis: Work with Product and Engineering teams to understand use cases and workflow elements
  • QA Leadership: Manage the QA organization and provide leadership and mentorship to other QA engineers
  • Plan Preparation: Prepare QA plans alongside engineering for the upcoming development sprint
  • Functional Testing: Perform or coordinate functional testing on all features completed by the Engineering Team
  • Bug Reporting: Regularly report bug statistics to Engineering and Product leadership
  • Release Testing: Design and execute or coordinate a thorough release testing suite at the end of each cycle
  • Regression Assurance: Ensure proper regression testing after bug resolution
  • Exploratory Testing: Conduct exploratory testing to ensure product quality
  • Process Improvement: Identify QA process bottlenecks and suggest actions for improvement
  • Service Collaboration: Work directly with external service providers to augment QA efforts
  • Tool Awareness: Stay up-to-date with new testing tools and test strategies
Relevant Information
What Does A QA Engineer Do?