Lead QA Engineer (AI native)

This position is listed on behalf of a partner company, who manages all applications and next steps. Our partner is looking for a Lead QA Engineer (AI Native) based in South Africa. Join a small, senior engineering team building a product in an AI-first development environment. You will take ownership of the quality strategy for a complex codebase where AI agents generate most of the code. The product includes critical financial flows, making reliability, testing, and release safety central to the role. You will design the end-to-end testing pipeline, from pre-merge validation through release and production gates. The role combines hands-on test automation, engineering, AI-agent workflows, and continuous quality improvement. As an individual contributor in a flat team, your impact will come through automation, scalable processes, and intelligent use of AI. You’ll have substantial autonomy to define how quality is managed in an evolving AI-native engineering environment.