Testing Lead

The Test Lead will be responsible for leading and managing the end-to-end QA activities across multiple applications, products, and testing teams, ensuring the delivery of high-quality, scalable, and reliable software solutions. This role requires strong expertise in manual and coordination-level testing activities, stakeholder communication, defect management, and quality governance. The Test Lead will work closely with Product Managers, Business Analysts, Development Teams, Automation Teams, and Business Stakeholders to drive QA strategy, execution excellence, and continuous process improvement. The ideal candidate should possess strong leadership capabilities along with hands-on experience in system integration testing, API validation, database testing, and test management processes. The candidate should be comfortable working with tools such as Postman, MongoDB, SQL, and handling XML/JSON payload validations. ROLE AND RESPONSIBILITIES • Lead and manage QA teams of manual testers across multiple projects, products, and modules. • Define and implement overall QA strategy, test plans, and testing approaches aligned with business objectives. • Ensure complete test coverage across functional, regression, UAT, and release testing cycles. • Coordinate with Product Managers, Business Analysts, Developers, and Stakeholders to understand requirements and define testing scope. • Drive end-to-end test execution activities and ensure timely delivery with high quality standards. • Manage defect lifecycle activities including defect identification, logging, prioritization, tracking, RCA coordination, and closure verification using tools like JIRA or equivalent. • Monitor and report QA metrics, testing progress, defect trends, release readiness, and quality dashboards to leadership and stakeholders. • Ensure effective system integration testing, API testing, and database validation testing. • Perform database validation using SQL/MongoDB queries wherever required. • Participate in sprint planning, backlog grooming, daily stand-ups, retrospectives, release planning, and project governance meetings. • Identify project risks, quality gaps, and delivery bottlenecks proactively and drive mitigation plans. • Review and approve test cases, test scenarios, test execution results, and QA deliverables. • Ensure adherence to QA standards, processes, best practices, and organizational compliance requirements. • Collaborate with automation teams to identify automation opportunities and improve regression efficiency. TAGICL-D-JD|Rev No: 1.0|Issued Date: 01.07.2024|Classification: Internal 2 • Support resource planning, task allocation, mentoring, and performance management of QA team members. • Drive continuous improvement initiatives within QA processes, tools, and methodologies. • Provide leadership guidance and technical support to team members to ensure successful project execution. EDUCATION & EXPERIENCE REQUIREMENTS • Must have a bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Software engineering, or a related discipline. • Minimum 10+ years of experience in software testing, including at least 3 years in a lead/coordination role. • Strong knowledge of software testing life cycle (STLC) and defect life cycle. • Proven experience in writing and executing test cases, test plans, and test scripts. • Proficiency in bug tracking and test management tools such as JIRA, TestRail, or HP ALM. • Understanding of different types of testing, including smoke, sanity, functional, regression, and UAT. • Hands-on experience with API testing (Postman), database validation (SQL/MongoDB), and payload formats (XML/JSON). • Excellent communication and documentation skills. • Exposure to automation testing concepts