About the Role:
We're hiring a Principal Quality Engineer to own quality as a discipline at Heartbeat - not to build a QA team, but to define how quality works across our engineering and product organization. This person will establish principles, practices, and systems that make quality intrinsic to how we develop, validate, and release software.
This is a founding role. Quality today is strong - our engineers and product team own it directly, with solid automated regression coverage already in place. We're making this investment because the platform's complexity and clinical scope warrant a dedicated senior person focused entirely on making quality systematic, scalable, and increasingly efficient.
What You'll Own:
- Quality strategy for our clinical platform: Define what quality means at Heartbeat, how we measure it, and how we improve it - across partner-specific configurations, clinical decision support, workflow orchestration, and integration points.
- Validation architecture: Design the systems that make validation fast, reliable, and low-friction - test data strategies, environment management, automation frameworks, CI/CD integration.
- Release confidence: Strengthen release predictability by systematizing validation earlier in the development lifecycle.
- Embedded cross-functional partnership: Participate in refinement, influence scoping and acceptance criteria, and shape what "done" means as a core member of the product and engineering team.
- Exploratory testing: Perform targeted exploratory testing on high-risk areas, new features, edge cases, and clinical workflow paths.
What You Bring:
- Extensive experience evolving a QA function, defining principles, and selecting tools.
- Ability to work as a peer alongside engineers and product, influencing development practices rather than just validating outputs.
- Deep technical fluency in test automation, CI/CD, and testing infrastructure.
- Systems-thinking approach, covering risk models, failure modes, configuration matrices, and integration boundaries.
- Strong judgment on balancing automation with exploratory testing.
- Comfort with ambiguity and ability to define structure in a founding role.
Strongly Preferred:
- Experience in healthcare, fintech, or other regulated industries.
- Familiarity with clinical data standards or healthcare integrations (FHIR, HL7, CCDA).
- Experience testing highly configurable systems.
- Practical experience validating AI/ML-assisted workflows.