Quality Engineering Lead/Architect

Position: Technical QE Lead Location: Onsite (Cincinnati, OH) Overview Our large retail clientis seeking a Technical Lead in Quality Engineering to drive modern automation practices and ensure reliable, repeatable testing for mission-critical retail checkout applications. This role is less architecture and more hands-on, a technical leadership position focused on mocking, service-level virtualization, CI pipeline design, and component-level benchmarking. The successful candidate will be ableto overcome its dependency on lab hardware by designing software-only test environments, orchestrating containers in CI, and enabling developers and QE teams to validate components quickly and independently. The role requires strong technical leadership, practical engineering skills, and the ability to influence teams that operate in a fast-moving, dynamic environment. Key Responsibilities Test Environment & Virtualization Leadership Design and implement mocking and service virtualization strategies for POS software components—enabling isolated, hardware-independent testing. Stand up ephemeral, containerized test environments in GitHub Actions using Docker/OCI images or containerized Java services. Collaborate with development teams to ensure all new code paths are testable without reliance on hardware labs. Help guide teams in adopting true CI-first validation. CI/CD & Pipeline Ownership Collaborate with teams to build and maintain GitHub Actions workflows that deploy mocked services and supporting components for automated testing. Ensure test frameworks, mocked services, and performance scripts run reliably in self-contained CI environments. Establish patterns for reproducible test orchestration across components and services. Engineering & Hands-On Problem Solving Build supporting utilities, test harnesses, or mock services where gaps exist. Implement API-first and asynchronous message-queue testing strategies to decouple validation from physical devices and enable isolated, container-based validation. Troubleshoot complex interactions across components, mocked services, and CI pipelines. Quality Enablement & Cross-Team Influence Provide technical mentoring to QE and developer teams on testability, CI integration, and performance benchmarking. Act as a bridge between engineering, product, and QA to ensure quality standards remain consistent and actionable. Champion modern testing practices and guide teams toward deterministic, container-driven environments rather than hardware-based workflows. Performance Testing Support Contribute to component-level performance and load test design. Use or support tools such as NeoLoad, JMeter, or Gatling (NeoLoad experience preferred). Ensure performance tests run in CI-based or virtualized environments where feasible. Required Qualifications 7+ years in Quality Engineering or Software Engineering, with 2+ years in a senior or technical lead capacity. Strong experience designing mocked environments, service virtualization, or stubbing strategies in distributed systems. Hands-on CI/CD experience (preferably GitHub Actions) deploying containerized applications. Strong proficiency in at least one modern language (Java, TypeScript/JavaScript, Python, or similar). Experience with test automation frameworks (Karate, Cypress, BDD tools, or API-focused frameworks). Familiarity with performance testing concepts and tooling. Ability to thrive in high-change, ambiguous environments where rapid decision-making is required. Strong communication and collaborative skills. Preferred Qualifications Experience with retail or POS systems at the software integration layer. Experience building custom test harnesses or supporting frameworks. Experience influencing organizations transitioning from hardware-dependent testing models to modern CI-driven workflows. Why This Role Matters This position is central to enabling component-level validation, eliminating hardware bottlenecks, and accelerating test cycles. By deploying mocked services in CI and designing stable test environments, the Technical Lead in QE will helpscale quality across multiple POS components and deliver a more reliable in-store experience to millions of customers.