Quality Platform Staff Engineer

About The Role

The Staff Engineer, Quality Platform will lead Lob's quality program - establishing the standards, tooling, and dashboards that make quality measurable and visible across the engineering organization, enabling teams to ship with confidence and discipline. They will partner closely with engineering teams to build a culture where quality is a shared engineering responsibility, not an afterthought. This is a hands-on individual contributor role - the expectation is that this person leads through influence, credibility, and technical depth not through direct management authority.

What You’ll Work On

• Establish Lob's quality metrics program - standing up per-repo dashboards that surface test inventory, coverage trends, pass/fail rates, and flaky test signals across the engineering organization.
• Define and roll out a scheduled nightly test execution strategy across all repos, with regression alerting and failure triage tooling that gives teams early warning before defects reach production.
• Define and roll out Lob's Definition of Done - a shared standard for what 'ready to ship' means across the engineering organization and establish the CI/CD gates that enforce it: coverage thresholds, required test types, and quality checks per change category.
• Define and champion Lob’s AI quality strategy - evaluating and adopting AI-assisted testing tools (test generation, flakiness detection, coverage gap analysis) and establish perspective on where AI accelerates quality outcomes vs where human judgment remains essential.
• Partner with engineering teams to establish org-wide standards for integration and contract testing - defining what good looks like, configuring the CI integration that makes it adoptable, and creating visibility into which services have coverage and which don't.
• Define the standards and evaluate the tooling for E2E test coverage across backend, frontend, and data pipelines - working with feature teams to establish ownership of their own workflows, with Lob's flagship print & mail and address verification products as the first adopters.
• Evaluate, select, and roll out load and performance testing tooling - defining baseline SLOs for critical endpoints and integrating performance testing into the release process for high-risk changes.
• Integrate security scanning tooling into a unified vulnerability dashboard that gives engineering teams and leadership clear, actionable visibility into open issues by repo, severity, and age.
• Partner with engineering teams as a quality advocate - reviewing system designs for testability, identifying systemic risk patterns surfaced by incidents, and coaching engineers on testing best practices that build lasting engineering discipline.
• Collaborate with engineering leadership to define org-wide quality goals, inform roadmap prioritization with quality signal data, and present engineering health metrics to stakeholders in a clear and compelling way.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of hands-on experience in software engineering, quality engineering, or platform engineering roles, including at least 3 years establishing quality programs, standards, and tooling at a company where that infrastructure did not previously exist.
• Demonstrated experience evaluating, selecting, and rolling out testing tooling and frameworks across multiple testing types: integration, contract, end-to-end, load, and performance - with the judgment to know which approach fits which problem.
• Strong CI/CD fluency - experience configuring quality gates, integrating test results into delivery pipelines, and establishing standards that make the right behavior the default path.
• A strong working knowledge of AI-assisted and testing tools with hands on experience leveraging AI for test generation, analysis or triage and a clear perspective on how AI should accelerate a quality program.
• Experience standing up engineering dashboards and metrics tooling that surfaces test results across repositories, tracks flakiness, and visualizes quality trends - turning raw test data into actionable engineering health signals.
• Experience integrating security scanning tooling into developer workflows, with the ability to create unified, prioritized visibility for both engineering teams and leadership.
• Experience with observability and monitoring platforms is a strong plus.
• Technical fluency across modern engineering tooling and infrastructure - able to evaluate, configure, and integrate tools to deliver impact quickly.
• Exceptional communication and influence skills - the ability to earn the trust of engineers and shift culture through credibility, well-designed standards, and pragmatic advocacy rather than top-down mandates is essential.
• Proven experience operating in startup or late-stage startup environments where quality culture and engineering discipline were built, not inherited. Comfort navigating ambiguity, sequencing work without established process, and delivering impact in phases.
• Familiarity with API-first products and the specific testing challenges they present — including contract drift, versioning, and consumer-driven contract testing - is a strong plus.
• Comfort running post-mortem analysis and connecting quality signals to production incidents, with the ability to quantify the business impact and ROI of quality investments for engineering and executive leadership.

Since great engineers come from a variety of backgrounds, it doesn’t particularly matter if you have a specific degree—we want to hear about your contributions in a real-world setting.

Compensation information

The compensation for this role consists of a base salary + additional RSUs.

Annual Base Salary: $187,500 - $207,500

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