QA Lead(English)

Overview

We are looking for a QA Lead to build the quality system behind THECOO's flagship products, "Fanicon" and "+KIRARI."

Fanicon is a fan community platform where fans join paid communities and interact directly with Icons (creators, talents, artists, and others). +KIRARI is a fan community app that connects artists and talents with fans. Together the two services have around 500,000 members.

In this role you will do two things: manage the manual testing team, and lead the process of test automation. You will spend your time building the system and the team that keep quality up, rather than running tests yourself.

You do not have to write the automation code. What we need is someone who decides what to automate and in what order, and who drives that work together with the product engineers. This is not a job that stays inside QA — you will pull the development team in, so that quality is built earlier rather than checked at the end.

This role is performed in Japanese. The manual testers are Japanese speakers, and the product itself is in Japanese (see Requirements below).

Mission

Your mission is to raise the quality and reliability of the product without slowing releases down.

Fanicon and +KIRARI are live paid services. Live streaming, real-time chat, digital gifting, points, e-commerce, and event ticketing all ship in a single app. Revenue arrives through several of those paths at once, so a defect goes straight to the money and to the trust of our users. At the same time, the engineering division is moving to a next-generation platform, and we need releases to get faster.

Holding both of those at once is the core challenge of this role. You will decide what people check, what gets automated, and what standard a release has to meet — and then make it happen through both the team and the process.

Responsibilities

• Defining QA strategy and test plans across Android, iOS, and Web
• Planning and running the testing schedule for each release and sprint
• Managing the manual testing team — assignments, coaching, and day-to-day feedback
• Owning the accuracy of the test cases. Building a baseline set of test patterns, so that every pattern that matters stays current and every result is recorded accurately
• Leading the test automation process, and building the regression suite together with the product engineers
• Deciding what gets automated and what stays with people, and setting the order based on what each is worth
• Reviewing the existing test process, finding the bottlenecks, and fixing them
• Designing and running the quality gates in the release process. The call to hold a release on quality grounds is yours to make
• Triaging and prioritizing defects, and putting in place the means to stop them coming back
• Designing the regression testing that the platform migration needs, as the monolith is split up piece by piece
• Planning load and performance testing, with the streams and events that spike our traffic in mind
• Defining quality metrics, making them visible, and reporting them to the engineering division and to management — defects that reached production, post-release incidents, regression and automation coverage, and the basis for release decisions
• Setting up how defect reports from the business teams and customer support reach QA
• Using AI tools to make test design, test case generation, and test execution more efficient
• Supporting the growth of QA members through 1-on-1s and everyday feedback
• Interviewing and onboarding new QA members

Requirements

• Experience working in QA (roughly 5+ years)
• Experience leading manual testers — assignments, coaching, and feedback. The size of the team and whether you had formal evaluation authority do not matter
• QA experience with mobile apps (Android / iOS) or web services
• Experience writing and running your own test plans and test designs
• Experience leading a test automation effort. You do not need to be able to write the automation code yourself, but you do need to decide what to automate and in what order, and to read that code well enough to argue about it with an engineer
• An understanding of the trade-off between quality and release speed, and the ability to bring people to an agreement on it
• Japanese (business level or above) — the manual testers are Japanese speakers, and you will manage them in Japanese. Defects also come to you in Japanese from the business teams and from customer support
• The ability to understand the product in Japanese — the UI, the on-screen text, and the specifications for Fanicon and +KIRARI are all in Japanese. You will read the specs in Japanese, look at the actual screens, and design the tests from them

The development team works in English, but a project manager who speaks both Japanese and English sits between you and them, so English is not a requirement.

Preferred Skills (Nice to Have):

• Experience moving a mostly-manual operation over to automated testing
• Experience writing automation code yourself
• QA experience with a consumer service that includes live streaming, real-time communication, or in-app purchases
• Experience designing and running load or performance tests
• Experience with automation frameworks such as Playwright, Appium, Espresso, or XCUITest
• Experience building and running test environments on CI/CD (CircleCI, GitHub Actions)
• Experience testing server-side systems and APIs, or verifying DRM and content protection
• Experience defining quality metrics and turning them into process improvements
• Experience leading QA through a large-scale system overhaul or migration
• Experience managing testers in a setup that includes contractors or outside vendors
• Experience using AI tools for test design or test case generation
• Experience starting a QA function, or building a team through hiring
• Reading, writing, and discussing in English — being able to talk to the development team directly makes the automation work move faster

Tech Stack

• CI/CD: CircleCI (we are currently reviewing how tests are run)
• Backend: Node.js / TypeScript / Express / NestJS
• Mobile: Kotlin / Swift
• Data stores: PostgreSQL / MySQL / Redis
• Data analytics: BigQuery
• Infrastructure: GCP / AWS
• Collaboration: GitHub / Linear / Slack / Notion
• Development style: Agile development

We have not settled on an automation framework. We expect to choose one with you after you join, based on the product and on the team we have.

Why This Role

• Design the quality system itself, rather than fit into one that already exists
• Own both the manual testing team and the direction of automation
• Work directly with the Head of Engineering on decisions about quality
• Sit at the center of the platform migration, the engineering division's biggest piece of work
• Raise quality on a live product that has been running for over ten years, without ever taking it down
• Change how QA itself is done here, including how far we take AI tools

Who We're Looking For

We are looking for someone who sees their job as creating a state where quality holds, rather than as running the tests.

Someone who works with the manual testers day to day, respects that work, and automates the parts that should be automated. Rather than telling engineers that quality matters, we want someone who builds the system with them, as part of the development team.

Things here are not tidy. The documentation is thin, and some work still sits with one person only. We are looking for someone who will not just point that out, but decide what to fix first and start.

THECOO's Values

At THECOO, we hold shared values (our "DNA") across the whole company: "Keep challenging what seems impossible" and "Freedom and Responsibility."

We want to work with people who, even when facing difficult product or organizational challenges, think about how to make things happen rather than why they can't, and who can take on challenges together with the team while taking responsibility for their own judgment.