Tier 3 · ongoing ownership
Fractional QA Lead - Vireo QA
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 callthe two tiers
Ownership, or ownership plus the AI-quality system.
Fractional QA Lead
from $5,000/mo USD
Senior ownership of your quality function and release process. I maintain the framework, review PRs where fixes are cheap, gate every release, watch your evals, and send a written quality status each week. A senior owner of the “is this safe to ship” call, without a full-time hire.
Fractional AI Quality Lead
from $7,000/mo USD
Everything in QA Lead, plus:
The AI-quality system, for teams whose core risk is the model itself: eval suites built and maintained, prompt-regression gates, model and behavior drift monitoring, injection and safety testing, and AI release gates. The higher price reflects greater scope and stakes, not more hours.
async-first
Written reports and recorded walkthroughs your whole team can watch, senior QA ownership that doesn’t fill your calendar. A call is available whenever you want one.
kpis + 30-day exit
Every retainer is tied to 3–5 written KPIs. Need more throughput than a tier implies? That’s a scale-up or a fresh Foundation Sprint, never a bigger day-rate.
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, always-on availability (a retainer is senior ownership, not a full-time seat).
- 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.
Do we have to meet?
No. I run async-first: written reports and recorded walkthroughs you review on your schedule and share with your team. If you’d rather talk, a call is always available.
How do I know it’s working?
Every retainer is tied to 3–5 written KPIs (things like eval coverage, CI gate pass rate, and escaped-defect count) reported to you regularly, with a 30-day exit. You always know exactly what you’re paying for.
Why two tiers?
The Fractional QA Lead tier (from $5,000/mo) is senior ownership of your quality and release process. The AI Quality Lead tier (from $7,000/mo) adds the AI-quality system, evals, prompt-regression gates, drift monitoring, and safety testing, for teams whose core risk is the model itself. The higher price reflects greater scope and stakes, not more hours.
Will you have enough capacity for us?
Each tier is sized to own your quality function and release cadence, not billed by the hour or the day. You get clear response-time expectations and a defined scope in writing. If your throughput outgrows the tier, we scale it up or scope a fresh Foundation Sprint, we don’t sell you more days.
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.
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.