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…