✓ Tier 3 · ongoing ownership
Fractional QA Lead
You built (or bought) a QA foundation. Now it needs an owner (someone senior to keep the evals honest and sign off on releases) without a full-time hire.
I stay on as your QA lead on retainer: maintaining and extending the framework, reviewing PRs, signing off releases, and watching your evals, for a fraction of a full-time hire, tied to written KPIs with a 30-day exit.
Book a call✓ what you get
A senior QA owner, on a fraction of a full-time budget.
- Framework maintenance and extension: your test suite keeps pace with the product instead of rotting into flakiness.
- PR and test reviews: quality feedback in the pull request, where it’s cheap to fix.
- Release sign-offs: a senior owner of the “is this safe to ship” call on every release.
- Eval monitoring: watching prompt regression and output-quality evals so model and prompt drift surface before customers find them.
- QA advisory: tooling decisions, hiring help when you’re ready for a full-time QA, and process calls as you scale.
- Quarterly strategy refresh: where the risk is moving, what to automate next, and what to retire.
✓ who it's for
For teams who need ownership, not headcount.
- You’ve had a Foundation Sprint (or already have a framework) and need it owned, not abandoned.
- You want senior release judgment without a $160k full-time hire, yet.
- Your AI features change often and someone needs to keep the evals honest.
- You value a written set of KPIs and a 30-day exit over an open-ended contract.
Explicitly out of scope
- Full-time availability, the retainer is capped at ~2 days/week equivalent.
- Net-new framework builds from scratch (that’s a Foundation Sprint).
- Unused capacity rolling over month to month.
✓ the outcome
Quality has an owner. Releases get a senior sign-off, evals stay green, and your engineers get their Fridays back, without carrying a full-time QA salary before you’re ready.
✓ questions
Before you book.
How much time do I actually get?
The equivalent of about 1–2 days per week, capped at two days to protect the quality of the work and keep scope honest. You get response-time expectations and a clear capacity definition in writing.
What are the terms?
A 3-month initial term, then month-to-month with 30 days notice. Tied to 3–5 written KPIs with a 30-day exit, billed on the 1st via auto-charge. No surprises, no lock-in.
Why “from $4,500/mo”?
The retainer scales with involvement, roughly $3k–$6k/mo depending on how much release ownership and eval monitoring you need. For AI-intensive accounts it can run higher. We set the right level for your actual load, not a one-size number.
Will this make hiring a full-time QA harder later?
The opposite. When you’re ready to hire, your new QA engineer inherits a working framework, an operating model, and clean evals, and I’ll help you write the job spec and onboard them. The retainer is a bridge, not a moat.
Is this just QA as a service?
Call it that if you like, but it’s outsourced QA leadership, not a staffing agency renting you hours. A senior owner of your quality and release calls, on a retainer sized to your actual load, instead of a full-time hire or a body shop.
One bad regression away from a lost week.
Book a 20-minute intro call. I’ll tell you honestly whether I can help and what the right next step is: audit, sprint, or nothing yet.