For a green build that actually means something
Hire QA Engineers
A test suite that always passes is not the same as a product that actually works, and the gap between those two things is where real bugs live. These engineers are tested on finding that exact gap, then placed to make your green build mean what everyone assumes it means.
- Profiles typically within two business days
- Replacement Assurance: If an engineer is not the right fit, a replacement from our own team starts within ten business days of your request, at no extra cost
- You interview before placement if you want to
- At least four hours a day inside your core working hours. Two hours plus a daily written handover for the US West Coast
- 14-Day Risk-Free Trial: For your first engineer on a time-and-materials engagement. Up to 14 calendar days or 80 logged working hours, whichever comes first. End within the trial and pay nothing for trial hours. Continue beyond it and those hours are billed at the agreed rate. Unpaid trial work remains ours if you stop
How we evaluate a QA engineer
The tasks, the signals and the onboarding, walked through by the people who run them.
90 secSample frame · video pending01Published, not promised
The assessment behind every engineer we send.
The QA bar is published, not assumed: five competencies, the exact task behind each, and the shortcut that ends a candidacy. Most interviews ask about tool preferences. This one asks whether the test suite would actually catch a real bug.
What we listen forWhether they fix the actual fragility, not just rerun flaky tests.
A test suite has become so flaky that developers ignore failures by default. Propose your approach.
- What strong sounds like
- Investigates the specific causes of flakiness (timing, shared state, environment) before proposing a framework fix, restoring trust gradually.
- What gives us pause
- Proposes rerunning failed tests automatically to reduce noise, without addressing why the tests are flaky in the first place.
Playwright · Cypress · Selenium
Postman · REST Assured · Pact
GitHub Actions · Jenkins · Test Reporting
JIRA · TestRail · Docker
02Who you actually meet
The bench, priced by seniority.
Three seniority tiers, priced honestly, and the engineers who fill each one today. Real names and photos take their place as soon as we can share them, and the standard stays exactly the same.
Engineer
Features scoped tightly enough to ship inside your review bar, every time.
The right first hire when your seniors already set the standard.
$2,000–2,600per month
Senior
The hard module nobody else wants to own, taken end to end.
Ownership of a surface, without adding a manager to your headcount.
$2,800–3,600per month
Lead
The workstream's decisions, made daily, so nothing waits on a meeting.
One accountable voice for a pod or initiative that can't afford to drift.
$3,900–4,900per month
QA engineer
3 yrs · US East overlap
Rebuilt a flaky test suite so developers stopped ignoring its failures
- Playwright
- CI/CD
- Test Design
Senior QA engineer
6 yrs · UK + EU hours
Added contract testing that caught a breaking API change before mobile users saw it
- Cypress
- Pact
- API Testing
Lead QA engineer
9 yrs · EU + US split
Owns the quality strategy behind a product shipping weekly with zero major escapes
- Architecture
- Test Strategy
- TestRail
Indicative ranges, representative profiles. Exact figures and named engineers arrive with your shortlist.
Weighing this against a freelancer, a direct hire or a marketplace? See the honest comparison
03From stated problem to first change
Four steps, each closing on evidence.
This process tests judgement about real quality, not familiarity with a specific tool. Stopping at any step along the way costs you nothing.
Define the quality problem
We map where your test suite's coverage or trust is actually breaking down. The brief documents that specific gap, never a checklist of testing tools to memorise.
A brief your leads signMatch against your pipeline
Candidates are screened against your actual stack, your release cadence and your review culture. Three engineers who understand your pipeline beat thirty who list automation tools on a CV.
Three fits, not thirty CVsAssess on the real tasks
Your team can watch the flaky-test diagnosis and regression-risk exercises directly. What shows up is quality judgement, not a rehearsed opinion about frameworks.
Evaluation you can watchOnboard inside your process
Access, standards and a first bounded improvement to a real test suite. Continuity cover keeps a departure from ever becoming your release-day emergency.
A merged change in week one
04Evidence and proof
Engineers who made the green build trustworthy again.
QA proof is a defect caught before release, not a coverage percentage. Every record here waits for written client approval before production.
Explore case studies
A green test suite that finally meant something.
Tern's test suite passed reliably while bugs kept reaching production. An embedded QA engineer found that most tests asserted only that code ran without checking actual output, and rebuilt the suite around real assertions.
- Production defect-escape rate
- Cut sharply
- Time to rebuilt suite
- One sprint
He caught a breaking API change in a contract test before our mobile app users ever saw it.
Sample · pending client approval
Our flaky tests stopped being background noise everyone ignored and started meaning something again.
Sample · pending client approval
05Three shapes, one standard
Add an engineer, a quality pod, or a practice.
Most teams start with one engineer strengthening an existing test suite. Some need a pod that owns release quality end to end. Where a whole product needs building and testing from scratch, we point you to the practice instead.
- Team extension
One named engineer
A single QA specialist inside your direction and your reviews. The smallest commitment, and the usual first step.
- Delivery pods
A quality pod
A pod with its own lead that owns test strategy and release confidence end to end. You set priorities while the pod carries delivery.
- Product engineering
The practice, not the person
Where a whole product needs building and testing from scratch, product engineering takes that scope on instead.
06Straight answers
Asked before a QA hire is signed.
01What does a QA engineer actually do day to day?
Designs and maintains test automation that asserts real outcomes, catches breaking API changes before clients do, and makes honest regression-risk calls under real deadlines. The unglamorous majority of the work is making a green build trustworthy, not just green.
02Do you hire for a specific testing framework?
Matched to your actual stack. Judgement about test value and flakiness transfers across Playwright, Cypress and Selenium, then the evaluation confirms familiarity with whichever you run.
03Can we run our own interviews as well?
Yes, the published tasks are built to be reused directly. Several clients now run the flaky-test diagnosis exercise themselves in later hiring rounds.
04How fast can a QA engineer start?
A shortlist arrives within days from a bench evaluated continuously. From there, actual onboarding speed depends mostly on your side's repository and pipeline access process.
05Who manages the engineer day to day?
Your leads set priorities and hold the release standards. On our side sits payroll, continuity and managing the handover if your plans ever shift.
06What if the engineer is not the right fit?
Flag it inside the first weeks and the replacement is on us. Whoever replaces them starts with that exact mismatch already documented, so it does not repeat.
07Do your QA engineers use AI coding tools?
Yes, openly. AI drafts boilerplate test scaffolding quickly; the engineer stays accountable for every assertion design, quality-gate decision and merge that reaches your pipeline.
08How does pricing work for a hired QA engineer?
The bands above frame a realistic range, and the shortlist locks the specific figure once scope is settled. Monthly billing, no placement fee, notice-period exit only.