Senior QA Engineer

About Upheal

Upheal is transforming mental health care through AI-powered therapy intelligence and clinical automation. We help therapists focus on what matters most—client care—by taking on their administrative and analytical workload.

Role overview

As a Senior QA Engineer, you will be the primary driver of our quality strategy, identifying the right balance between robust automation and startup velocity. You’ll own the technical evolution of our testing infrastructure and CI/CD pipelines, working cross-functionally to mentor both QA and developers so that quality becomes a shared responsibility. We are looking for a pragmatic leader who values ROI over perfection and is ready to shape how we build and ship reliable software as we scale.

Key responsibilities

• Define and evolve the quality strategy: You will identify the right balance for our current stage, ensuring high quality without introducing bottlenecks like "test-for-everything" automation coverage or bureaucratic workflows. You will proactively evolve our approach, knowing exactly when it is time to apply more robust processes as the company grows.
• Technical Leadership: You’ll own the technical side of testing—evolving our automation framework, keeping our CI/CD pipelines fast, and designing scalable strategies for test data management.
• Lead quality within product teams: You’ll work directly with two of our product teams as the primary driver for all testing efforts. You will collaborate with developers to ensure quality is a shared responsibility. You’ll get involved early in the design phase to spot potential issues before they ever become tickets.
• Mentor and Coach: You will formally manage and support a Junior QA colleague. You’ll help them sharpen their technical skills and build the confidence to act as an authority on quality within their team, taking full responsibility for their growth as part of our QA team of two.
• Provide visibility into what matters: You’ll define which metrics we should observe to maintain a clear picture of our quality as we scale. You will pinpoint codebase "hotspots" and highlight testing gaps, ensuring the team knows exactly where to prioritize attention to mitigate risk.
• Future Growth: You will help us identify where our processes are getting stuck and build a better way of working. As the team expands, this role can evolve based on your interests: you can either move into a QA Manager role (focusing on people while staying hands-on) or remain on the technical track as a Staff Engineer.

Skills

• Automation & CI/CD: You have a deep background in building and scaling automation frameworks for both UI and APIs. You know how to integrate quality into the CI/CD pipeline so that it remains fast and reliable, rather than becoming a bottleneck.
• Driving a Change: You have the ability to identify better ways of working and get the team on board. You know how to introduce new tools or improvements organically, ensuring they add real value to the workflow without adding unnecessary friction.
• Universal Player: You don’t stay "in the box" of a QA role. Whether it’s jumping into the code to fix a bug yourself, talking directly to customers to understand a pain point, or helping a dev debug a local environment, you do what is needed to move the needle.
• Pragmatic Risk-Taker: You are driven by ROI, not perfection. You understand that "won't fix" is a valid decision when there is a bigger opportunity elsewhere, and you are comfortable making trade-offs to keep delivery speed high.
• Identifying the Right Problems: You are highly proactive. You don’t wait for a list of tasks; you look at our processes and systems, find the biggest bottlenecks or risks, and decide which ones are worth solving first.
• Technical Mentorship & Coaching: You enjoy being a "multiplier." You support and level up junior colleagues and enjoy partnering with developers to help them own quality, share testing best practices, and build technical confidence across the team.

Nice to have

• You have experience in a high-growth startup where you had to build or pivot quality strategies on the fly.
• You have a background in performance testing, security testing, or observability tools.
• You are comfortable working with data and SQL to investigate issues or validate complex data-driven features.
• You have experience with "Infrastructure as Code" or helping manage the environments where tests actually run.
• You have a strong product sense and can challenge requirements before a single line of code is written.

What We Offer

• The opportunity to shape the content and brand presence of a rapidly growing company in mental health tech.
• A mission-driven team passionate about supporting therapists and improving mental healthcare.
• Remote-first culture with flexibility and autonomy.
• Competitive compensation, equity, and growth opportunities.