Principal Quality Engineer

LawnStarter is the nation's leading on-demand marketplace for lawn care and related services, with over $150M in annual bookings. We're expanding beyond lawn care to become the one-stop shop for all home services.

Our QA team is growing, and we're investing real money in better test coverage. We already have shared quality standards and a QA squad that organizes itself horizontally across teams. What we don't have is someone dedicated to owning that vision: every QA is heads-down on their own team, so nobody has the room to drive the standards forward, unify how the squad works, or push the state of the art. That's the gap this role fills. It's not a nice-to-have we're adding because things are going well. It's the structure and leadership we need to make what we've already built actually compound.

You'll be LawnStarter's first Principal Quality Engineer, reporting directly to the Head of Engineering. We already have quality standards, working CI/CD gates, and AI tooling in the mix. Nobody owns the vision behind all of it, drives it forward, or leads the QA squad that keeps it running. You will.

This isn't a QA management job today. You won't spend your day approving tickets or chasing bug counts. You'll take ownership of the standards and tooling that already exist, work collaboratively with the QA squad to improve them, and keep pushing the state of quality engineering forward as the org grows. As the QA squad grows, this role could take on direct people management of QAs, so hiring, coaching, and performance management experience is a real plus even though it's not the day-one job.

You're not starting from zero, and you're not inheriting a mess either. That means the job isn't "invent a strategy nobody has thought about." It's "listen to the QAs who live in this every day, understand where the pain is, and lead them toward what's next." We need someone who reads where LawnStarter is today and builds from there, not someone who shows up with a favorite tool stack and a coverage number they picked before they met the team.

• You own and evolve the quality strategy together with the QA team, instead of building one in a vacuum or just executing someone else's.
• You have direct sponsorship from the Head of Engineering and the room to keep growing the AI-native tooling already in the mix.
• Your success is measured by how much better the whole engineering org's quality gets under your leadership, not by a headcount number.

• Strategy and vision: The company-wide quality engineering roadmap, plus a quality accountability framework that spells out what engineers, EMs, and PMs each own at every stage of building software.
• Test strategy across the stack: Unit, component, contract, API, end-to-end, mobile, and non-functional testing (performance, load, accessibility), agreed with each team as their quality contract.
• AI-native quality tooling: AI agents and skills, including Claude Code style tooling, that any engineer can run on demand for test generation, code review, and quality guidance. You'll keep hunting for the next AI capability worth putting in front of the team.
• CI/CD and test infrastructure: Required checks, quality gates, E2E and visual regression pipelines, performance budgets, and the mobile test automation strategy across emulators and real device clouds. That includes deciding what actually needs to block a deploy versus what can run async, and keeping the pipeline itself fast.
• Production quality signal: Tying monitoring into incident response and building dashboards teams actually check, not ones that just exist.
• Technical mentorship of the QA discipline: QA engineers keep reporting to their own Engineering Managers today. You won't manage their day-to-day or their careers right now. You'll own the technical and craft side of QA org-wide, mentor QA engineers across every squad, and send your input to their EMs to feed performance reviews. That could change as the squad grows into a direct reporting line to this role.

We already have shared standards, working quality gates, and AI tooling in the mix. What's missing is someone whose job is to look at all of it, decide what needs to improve next, and actually drive that improvement instead of it being everyone's part-time responsibility.

Our QAs already organize horizontally across teams, but every one of them is focused on their own team's work day to day. Nobody has the bandwidth to unify how they work, spread what's working on one team to the others, or represent their pain points where decisions get made. You'll give that squad the structure and leadership it's missing.

The foundation works. The risk is standing still while the org grows. You'll keep pushing the state of the art, testing new approaches and tools, and deciding what's worth rolling out broadly versus what stays an experiment.

Right now, improving quality practice competes with each QA's day-to-day team commitments. You'll make it someone's actual job to carry that forward, and get engineers, EMs, and PMs treating it as planned work instead of something squeezed in.

• A clear quality vision, owned and communicated: Every product team can point to what "good" means for their testing and why, with you as the person who set that direction and keeps it current.
• Measurable improvement on existing gates: Flakiness, pipeline cost, and what runs sync versus async on core repositories are visibly better than when you started, not just maintained.
• At least one new AI-native capability shipped: You've pushed the existing AI tooling forward with something new, like an added test-generation flow or audit, that engineers actually reach for weekly.
• A QA squad that feels led: The QAs across teams can point to concrete ways their work, tools, or standards improved because someone was finally driving it.

• A traditional QA management job, at least not on day one: You won't manage QA engineers day to day or own their career growth right now. Their EMs do that. You own the technical and strategic direction of the QA discipline instead, with the door open to direct management as the squad grows.
• A "throw out what's there and start over" job: We have real standards and tooling worth building on. You can't parachute in with a pre-packaged process or a favorite tool stack and mandate it regardless of fit.
• A ticket-approval or gatekeeping role: You're not the last line of defense that blocks releases at the end. You're embedding quality earlier, so there's less to block.
• A headcount-growth play: Your success isn't measured by how big a QA team you build. It's measured by how much better the whole engineering org's quality gets.