The posting
QA Lead / QA Coordinator
Location: Kyiv, Ukraine Function: Engineering / Product Reports to: Engineering Leadership, with a close working relationship with Product Role type: Full-time, in person Language requirements: English B2 required, Ukrainian optional Reservation: We are able to discuss reservations for critical candidates with significant experience.
About Occam Industries
Occam Industries is a British-Ukrainian MilTech company building a hardware-agnostic software for next-generation defence capabilities.
We work directly with leading Ukrainian OEMs to bring autonomy to the frontline at scale - turning existing unmanned platforms into autonomous systems. Our technology is already deployed by Ukrainian brigades in combat, helping operators hit targets.
We believe in strength for peace. Ukraine has proved that a free society can defend its freedom when its citizens are willing and able to defend it. OCCAM exists to give those citizens the capability to do so.
We are based in Kyiv and well funded, giving us the resources to build and deploy at speed.
The Role
We are looking for an experienced QA Lead / QA Coordinator to take ownership of software quality across our development and release process.
This is not primarily a manual testing role. You will be responsible for ensuring that software reaches a consistently high standard before it is released, coordinating testing across engineering teams, maintaining clear quality gates and acting as the final QA sign-off before software is considered production-ready.
We are particularly interested in someone who has built their QA experience in the technology sector, where structured software development, release management, defect management and engineering quality practices are well established.
You will work closely with Product Managers, Engineering Managers, developers and operational testing teams to make sure that what we release works as intended, has been tested appropriately and has clear evidence behind the decision to release it.
What You'll Own
Quality Assurance
- Own the overall QA process across software development and releases.
- Define and maintain appropriate QA standards, test processes and release quality gates.
- Ensure acceptance criteria are clear, testable and understood before development is considered complete.
- Review test evidence and ensure appropriate functional, regression and integration testing has taken place.
- Identify recurring quality issues and work with Engineering to address their underlying causes.
- Ensure bugs are appropriately prioritised, tracked and resolved.
- Provide the final QA approval that software is of sufficient quality to release.
Release Management
- Coordinate software releases across Product, Engineering and testing teams.
- Maintain visibility of what is included in each release and its current readiness.
- Confirm that required testing, defect resolution and documentation have been completed before release.
- Run release readiness reviews where appropriate.
- Prevent software from being released where agreed quality standards have not been met.
- Maintain a clear record of release decisions, known issues and accepted risks.
- Support rollback, hotfix and incident processes when releases do not perform as expected.
Jira & Engineering Workflow
- Use Jira as the primary system for tracking development, testing, defects and release readiness.
- Ensure tickets progress through the engineering workflow correctly and that QA states accurately represent reality.
- Maintain clear relationships between stories, bugs, testing activity and releases.
- Create and maintain dashboards or reporting that give Product and Engineering clear visibility of quality.
- Ensure defects include sufficient information, reproduction steps, severity and supporting evidence.
- Help improve Jira workflows where changes would make engineering and QA processes more effective.
Coordination
- Coordinate QA activity across multiple engineering teams and products.
- Work closely with Product Managers to understand intended product behaviour and customer outcomes.
- Work with Engineering Managers and technical leads to understand technical risk.
- Coordinate with operational and field testing teams where software must also be validated in real-world environments.
- Ensure issues discovered during testing are quickly routed to the right engineering team.
- Communicate release readiness, risks and blockers clearly to senior stakeholders.
What We're Looking For
Essential
- Strong professional experience in software QA within the technology sector.
- Previous experience as a QA Lead, Senior QA Engineer, Test Lead, Release Manager or similar role.
- Strong understanding of modern software development and QA practices.
- Excellent working knowledge of Jira and software development workflows.
- Experience coordinating software releases and managing release readiness.
- Experience defining and enforcing quality gates.
- Strong understanding of bug lifecycle management, regression testing and acceptance testing.
- Confidence making a go / no-go recommendation on software releases.
- Ability to challenge Engineering or Product when the evidence does not support releasing software.
- Strong organisational skills and attention to detail.
- Clear written and verbal communication.
Desirable
- Experience working in an Agile product development environment.
- Experience working across software, embedded software, robotics, autonomy or other systems where software interacts with hardware.
- Experience with automated testing and CI/CD pipelines.
- Experience creating QA metrics and quality dashboards.
- Experience coordinating multiple testing environments or hardware configurations.
- Experience working with distributed or international engineering teams.
What Good Looks Like
Within this role, success means:
- Everyone knows exactly what must happen before software can be released.
- Jira accurately reflects the real quality and release status of the product.
- Bugs do not disappear between Engineering, QA and operational testing.
- Releases have clear test evidence and an accountable sign-off.
- Product and Engineering understand the risks associated with every release.
- Known quality issues are consciously accepted rather than accidentally shipped.
- Repeated defects lead to improvements in the engineering process.
- "Done" means tested, evidenced and genuinely ready to be used.
How We Work
We build technology that is used in demanding real-world environments, so quality cannot be treated as something that happens at the end of development.
The QA Lead / QA Coordinator is expected to bring the discipline and engineering practices found in strong software organisations and apply them to an environment where reliability, speed and operational performance all matter.
The role has the authority to stop a release when the required evidence of quality is not there. Equally, the role should help teams create processes that make releasing good software faster, rather than adding unnecessary bureaucracy.
You will be an advocate for a simple principle:
If we cannot demonstrate that the software is good, we are not ready to release it.
