At Vio we believe booking accommodation should feel smart, fair, and effortless — never overwhelming or unclear.
As one of the world’s fastest-growing travel tech platforms, we help millions of users make smarter travel decisions by comparing stays across 100+ booking sites — so they can find the perfect place, at the best price, anywhere in the world. We cut through the noise and complexity of hotel and vacation rental booking, surfacing real value with clarity, transparency, and full support. No tricks. No confusion. Just great stays — booked with confidence. With operations in 100+ markets and growing fast, our mission is to reshape how people discover and book accommodation through technology travelers can trust.

Who we're looking for
We are looking for a hands-on Quality Platform Lead to own Vio's quality strategy and automation platform across web, mobile, browser extensions, internal tooling and related surfaces.
This is a technical leadership role (Staff IC) reporting to the Director of Engineering. You define what good looks like for quality, decide where scarce testing effort goes, and give teams the confidence to ship. Your levers are release gates, quality telemetry, and a developer experience that makes the right tests easy to write and keep alive.
Product engineers own the tests for the features they build. Your remit is the platform, the strategy and the enablement that make that work hold up at scale. There is no QA department here and we have no plans to create one.

Where you'll start

• Web: Playwright, Checkly, BrowserStack

• Mobile: Patrol (Flutter)

• Coverage gaps across white-labels, browser extensions, widgets, APIs and internal tooling

• Web: Playwright, Checkly, BrowserStack

• Mobile: Patrol (Flutter)

• Coverage gaps across white-labels, browser extensions, widgets, APIs and internal tooling

The tooling can stay as it is. With a clear case you can migrate or rebuild. E2E coverage today is thin, so a different platform is genuinely on the table if it serves speed, maintainability and DX better. We have no predefined answer.
AI-assisted tooling is an open area too. We have no established practice for agent-generated tests or AI-assisted triage, so your judgment on what earns a place in the platform carries real weight.
What we lack today is clear ownership of strategy, release gates and shared quality telemetry, plus a low-friction path for engineers to spend their testing effort on the highest-risk scenarios.

How the role works
Your time splits between hands-on platform work, enablement, strategy and stakeholder telemetry. One insourced QA Engineer supports you. You own the technical direction, the standards and the quality outcomes.
Once the platform has low friction, product engineers write and maintain the tests for the domains they own. You enable that through patterns, docs, reusable modules, CI checks and risk-based guidance. Gatekeeping releases sits outside the role.
Expect no direct people-management responsibilities in the near future. Any further QE hire gets evaluated against the ~1:50 rule once the value is proven, and we have no committed headcount plan beyond that.

What you'll own
Quality strategy and platform

• Own the quality strategy and the automation platform across products, covering direction, standards and day-to-day health

• Decide whether to keep, evolve or replace the current tooling, with clear trade-offs on speed, maintainability and DX

• Set coding standards and patterns for test code, and keep the suite focused on the tests that earn their place

Release gates and telemetry

• Build automated release gates into CI/CD and define what protects the core journeys

• Give Product, Engineering and leadership real-time quality telemetry on release readiness, risk and pipeline health

• Put failure triage and flaky-test quarantine in place, so every failure is worth acting on

Risk-based coverage and testability

• Work with Product and Engineering to protect high-impact journeys and APIs

• Retire flaky and low-value tests, and concentrate effort where the risk is highest

• Act as the technical stakeholder for testability (hooks, mocks, contract tests, test data) and get those improvements onto team roadmaps

Developer enablement

• Make it easy for product engineers to write, run and maintain tests locally and in CI

• Embed quality into how teams plan and ship, and mentor the insourced QA Engineer

• Drive a measurable increase in developer satisfaction with quality tooling and DX

What success looks like in 12 months

• Platform ownership. You have taken over the automation platform across products and own it outright, with direction, standards and health all unambiguous, whether you kept the tooling or replaced it.

• Gates and focus. Release gates on the core journeys are fast and deterministic, and testing effort sits on the highest-risk scenarios.

• Dev ownership and satisfaction. Writing and maintaining tests is a routine part of Definition of Done, and developer satisfaction with quality tooling and DX has measurably improved.

• Telemetry. Eng and Product work from live release-readiness and risk dashboards, failures triage cleanly, and flaky tests go into quarantine.

• Less manual drag. Regular releases go out without manual testing, with exploratory testing reserved for major new work.

Who you are

• You have a track record of building or overhauling automation platforms (SWE / QE / SDET)

• You write production-grade code across app, test and infra repos. Language matters less to us than depth, though our stack today leans on TypeScript/JS, Elixir, Go, Python and Dart.

• You use AI agents effectively in your own engineering workflow and can judge where they belong inside a quality platform, from test generation to failure triage

• You have cross-platform web and mobile automation judgment, and can weigh unified toolchains against separate ones objectively

• You have deep CI/CD and test infrastructure experien