Software Quality Assurance Lead - Test Automation, Performance & AI-Assisted Testing

About the role

ICAN, a management consultancy connecting organisations with professionals in strategy, transformation, technology and people advisory, is hiring a Software Quality Assurance Lead in Abu Dhabi. This is a hands-on technical leadership role reporting to the Head of Engineering or Head of Quality Assurance, focused on building reliable automation frameworks, diagnosing performance issues and leading a team of quality engineers. The role covers quality engineering across JavaScript and TypeScript platforms, including user interfaces, APIs, data and integrations.

Key responsibilities

• Lead the overall quality assurance strategy across web applications, APIs, integrations and distributed systems.
• Design, build and maintain scalable automated testing frameworks using Playwright, TypeScript and JavaScript.
• Own performance, load and stress testing with k6 or JMeter, identifying bottlenecks and improving reliability.
• Integrate automated testing into CI/CD pipelines, set quality gates and establish reporting and monitoring.
• Introduce AI-powered and agentic testing solutions to improve test coverage, execution and maintenance.
• Work with engineering, product and platform teams from the design stage so testing reflects how systems are built and where they could fail.
• Collaborate with developers, architects and DevOps teams to identify risks, resolve defects and improve product quality.
• Lead, mentor and develop the QA engineering team, setting standards, best practices and continuous improvement.

Required profile

• 8+ years in software testing and quality engineering, including 3+ years leading automation or quality engineering teams.
• Expert knowledge of TypeScript, JavaScript and Node.js, including asynchronous programming and typing.
• At least 2 years of hands-on performance engineering with k6 or JMeter, beyond running existing scripts.
• Strong understanding of infrastructure and its impact on performance, including cloud platforms, containers, Kubernetes, load balancers, databases, indexing, caching, queues, connection pools and networking.
• Experience with observability tools, Jest or Vitest, JavaScript API testing, and Pact or equivalent contract testing.
• Solid understanding of distributed systems, microservices, REST, GraphQL, message queues and event streaming.
• Ability to read architecture diagrams and code, assess technical risks and challenge design decisions with evidence.
• Experience with CI/CD platforms such as GitHub Actions, Azure DevOps or Jenkins, alongside Docker and test environment automation.
• Practical experience applying LLMs or AI agents to testing, with a clear view of their capabilities and limitations.
• Strong communication skills; English speaking is mandatory, Arabic preferred.