QA Engineering Lead

Finnair is a diverse community of professionals who work ambitiously with a big heart and commitment. A strong safety culture is our priority and at the core of our everyday work, never taking it for granted. We are committed to doing our share in solving the climate challenge by determinedly following our science-based pathway to decarbonize our operations. We find meaning in our purpose: With our heart in Finland, we make every journey better, today and tomorrow.Our values – Always Safe, Customer at Heart and Stronger Together– guide us in everything we do. As part of the evolution of our Digital organisation, we are strengthening strategy implementation by clarifying structures and leadership to bring more focus, improve prioritisation, and support the business more closely. The new setup strengthens product management and software development practices and provides a clearer foundation for data‑ and AI‑driven development, while enabling clearer roles and new opportunities for professional growth. Our Digital Engineering team builds and runs Finnair's digital customer experience — one of Finland's largest e-commerce platforms. We're investing in how we build it: strengthening our product and software development practices and building toward more modern, AI-assisted engineering. Finnair Plus is central to how we build lasting relationships with our customers, and getting its technology right matters. We are looking for A QA Engineering Lead to own the technical direction for quality engineering across Digital Engineering. The role sits within the Engineering Platform team at Finnair HQ near Helsinki Airport, and works closely with the Principal Engineer who leads it. The Engineering Platform team enables scalable, efficient and high-quality software development across all of our engineering teams. As QA Engineering Lead, you own how Finnair builds quality in — driving the shift from traditional testing toward modern quality engineering, built on automation, continuous testing and AI-assisted QA. This is a senior individual-contributor role focused on technical leadership. Over time, and depending on how the role and the person develop, it may also grow to include people-leadership responsibilities. The teams keep a high degree of autonomy over how they build and test, while you set the broader quality direction, own the shared practices and tooling, and keep quality engineering strong and coherent across the organization. You'll work in close partnership with the Principal Engineer, Engineering Managers and product teams. Part of what makes the role interesting is shaping how Finnair approaches quality going forward, including where AI-assisted testing genuinely helps. In this role, you'll Set the quality engineering strategy, standards and frameworks used across Digital Engineering, and shape how teams approach testing, reliability and testability. Own the shared quality tooling and practices, and keep a pragmatic, ongoing dialogue about which technologies and approaches fit our needs. Drive test automation at every level — unit, integration, end-to-end, performance and security — and make sure quality is embedded into our CI/CD pipelines and DevOps ways of working. Help complex quality challenges succeed across teams: mentoring engineers on testing strategy and testable-by-design systems, and unblocking the hard decisions that span more than one team. Track the metrics that matter (defect rates, coverage, production incidents, lead time for fixes) and use them to make quality measurably better. Champion a culture of shared ownership of quality, and contribute to technical discussions across the wider engineering organization. Explore how AI can change the way teams design, build, test and operate software, and guide its adoption. What success could look like In your first months: you've got to know our systems, teams and the biggest quality challenges, formed a clear long-term vision and the first few steps towards it. Within the first year: a modern quality strategy is taking hold, automation is expanding across the delivery lifecycle, and teams are increasingly owning quality rather than handing it off. Over time: quality is visibly stronger across Digital Engineering — fewer production incidents, faster and safer delivery, and a quality culture that holds without you having to push it. To succeed and enjoy this role, we hope you bring Around 7-8+ years in software quality assurance or quality engineering, including experience leading quality initiatives across multiple teams. Strong, hands-on experience with modern test automation frameworks and tools, and a good grasp of building solutions that are testable by design. A solid understanding of CI/CD pipelines, DevOps practices and modern software architectures. Experience with performance, security or reliability testing. Comfort leading without formal authority: you bring people along through clarity and credibility, and you're happy to challenge a