QA Backend Tech Lead

We are Qatar Insurance Company (QIC), the leading insurance provider in GCC. With a history dating back to 1964, we have established ourselves as a pioneer in the insurance industry, offering innovative solutions to meet the diverse needs of individuals and businesses. Our vision is to make QIC group become the first Digital Ecosystem in the region by combining insurance and non-insurance services in one platform. Through our digital platforms, such as qic.online and the QIC app, we empower customers to manage their needs anytime and anywhere. Our employees have been featured in Forbes 30 under 30, teach at online universities, serve on program committees of major IT conferences, and have previously worked at Yandex, Tinkoff, Avito, Ozon, and other leading tech companies. As a QA Backend Tech Lead you will drive QA strategy and best practices across QIC s backend ecosystem while mentoring QA engineers in product teams. In your day-to-day work, you will be part of the Core team, ensuring the quality of our insurance platform and distributed backend services. The Core team develops the backend platform that powers QIC s insurance products and expanding lifestyle services, building scalable, high-performance services for the QIC Ecosystem. Responsibilities Define and own the backend quality strategy across the software development lifecycle Lead testing of distributed microservices, APIs, event-driven architectures, and end-to-end business flows Build and evolve automated testing frameworks and quality gates within CI/CD pipelines Drive non-functional, performance, and reliability testing for high-load backend services Use observability tools to investigate production issues and collaborate with engineering teams on root-cause analysis Improve test infrastructure, quality metrics, and engineering processes to increase release confidence Requirements • 5+ years of experience in QA Engineering • Proven technical leadership as a QA Tech Lead, QA Lead, or Principal SDET, with hands-on ownership of quality for production backend services • Significant experience testing distributed backend microservices, including gRPC APIs and Kafka event-driven systems • Hands-on experience with test automation, CI/CD quality gates (GitLab CI) • Experience with Kubernetes and public cloud platforms (GCP preferred) • Strong knowledge of observability tools (ELK, Grafana) for production debugging and root-cause analysis • Working background in defining QA strategy across the SDLC, including performance testing, quality metrics, and release readiness • Proficiency in performance and non-functional testing for high-load backend services • Excellent communication and stakeholder management skills • English level B2 or higher Nice to have: Strong programming skills in Java and/or Python, experience with contract, API, and performance testing tools. Experience with test data management in regulated environments, ArgoCD/GitOps, and insurance, fintech, payments domains or e-commerce is also relevant