Lead QA Engineer (Remote, Costa Rica)

About the role

Backcountry is looking for a Lead QA Engineer to report to the Director of Engineering, working remotely from Costa Rica. The role owns QA strategy and execution across the company's web, API and mobile digital properties with an AI-first approach, raising automation coverage, strengthening release confidence and influencing quality throughout the development lifecycle. In the first six months you will set up Playwright as the main automation framework and define release validation standards for the weekly deployment cadence.

Key responsibilities

• Own the end-to-end testing lifecycle and define scalable QA frameworks, automation strategies and release validation standards
• Drive shift-left quality checks and maintain functional, regression and performance/load testing coverage with Playwright, Postman and JMeter
• Build, coach and mentor QA engineers and influence quality practices across engineering teams
• Create reusable agents, champion Playwright, integrate automation into CI/CD pipelines and lead initiatives such as Apple Pay automation and AI-assisted testing
• Evaluate modern tooling such as BrowserStack, Appium and Gatling
• Work with product managers, developers and DevOps in Jira and TestRail, and align stakeholders on quality signals and release readiness
• Define and track KPIs for quality, defect density, test coverage and release reliability, and surface quality trends early

Required profile

• 7+ years in QA and testing, with at least 2+ years in a lead or senior individual contributor capacity
• Proven hands-on Playwright experience for web and API E2E automation
• Solid experience with functional, regression and performance/load testing
• Demonstrated SDLC and Agile experience with defect lifecycle management in Jira and TestRail
• Able to work independently under a steady release cadence and manage competing priorities

Required skills

• Playwright, Cypress, Selenium or comparable frameworks
• Python, JavaScript or Java
• Jira and TestRail
• Preferred: e-commerce QA automation, BrowserStack, Appium, Gatling, Grafana, Apple Pay automation and AI-assisted testing

What we offer

• Salary of $115,000 - $145,000 per year
• Primarily remote work with an attractive benefits package
• Private medical and life insurance, additional paid time off, monthly allowances and reimbursements, employee discounts and professional growth opportunities