Hire QA engineers who find the bugs before your users do
Hire dedicated QA engineers from a staffing partner that has spent two decades shipping software where untested code became someone else's outage. We place senior manual testers, automation engineers, SDETs, and performance specialists in the Philippines for SaaS, fintech, and enterprise teams. Every QA engineer on the bench is pre-vetted on Playwright, full-time, and ready to start in as little as 7 days.
QA teams trusted by enterprises, scale-ups, and Fortune 500s
Previously founded VinSolutions ($150M+ exit) and Stackify
I used to find QA annoying as a developer, then I became responsible for shipping the product
I'll be honest, I have not always loved QA. I spent years as a software developer, and a QA team's whole job is to find problems in your code. That gets annoying no matter how much you respect the work. But as an engineering leader, my job stopped being about whether my code passed review and started being about whether the product we shipped was actually any good. That flips your whole relationship with QA. If you want to deliver a quality product, you have to stop and make time to test it the same way you make time to build features.
The best way to do that is to automate as much of it as you can. Playwright and Cypress make automated QA cheaper and faster than it has ever been, and at this point there is no good reason to ship a real product without a real automated suite running on every release. AI raises the stakes even further. Developers everywhere are turning out AI-generated code at a pace nobody thought possible two years ago, and a lot of it is slop that somebody has to review. Engineers catch part of it in code review, but the QA team has to catch the rest. Manual exploratory testing and automated regression testing matter more in the AI era than they ever did, because the volume of new code hitting production is higher and the human attention on each line is lower.
The other shift I have come to believe in is that QA engineers should think like product people. They should understand what the product does, why it does it, and which customer outcomes actually matter. A QA engineer who is testing a feature without understanding the user it's for is going to file the wrong bugs and miss the right ones. Everyone shipping software in 2026 needs higher-level product thinking, and QA is no exception.
Today Full Scale staffs senior QA engineers in the Philippines for SaaS, fintech, and enterprise product teams. Our QA engineers are trained on the Product Driven framework from my book, they own both manual and automated testing, they default to Playwright for new automation work, and they bring product thinking to the bug reports they write. If you want offshore QA engineers who can actually own quality on a real product, you are in the right place.
AI writes the test code, real QA engineers decide what to test
AI is reshaping every layer of QA. Playwright has eaten the end-to-end browser testing market in the last two years, and every QA team we work with now uses Playwright with an AI assistant in the loop. Cursor, Claude, and GitHub Copilot can draft an automation script faster than any tester can type one from scratch.
That handles the syntax. It does not handle the strategy. The hard QA work, deciding what the regression suite should cover, which exploratory paths a real user will take, where the spec is ambiguous enough to hide a bug, still needs a senior QA engineer doing the judgment work. That is what we hire and train for at Full Scale.
AI ships the boilerplate, QA engineers own the test plan
AI assistants can generate a Playwright spec from a JIRA ticket in minutes. They can stub out unit tests from a function signature, write selectors that mostly work, and turn a Figma screen into a smoke test. What they cannot do is predict the failure modes a real user will run into, decide which of those failures actually matter for your release, and design the regression suite around the high-value flows. That work still needs a senior QA engineer. AI is a force multiplier on the boring execution layer. Test strategy is where the human still has to do the thinking.
Product Driven QA
Our QA engineers are trained on the five pillars from Matt's book: Vision, Focus, Clarity, Ownership, and Courage. The result is QA engineers who push back on a ticket that should never have shipped to QA, ask whether a feature was specced clearly enough to test, and own the quality bar on what gets released. They are not a button that says ready when the suite goes green. They are a partner who can tell you which of those green tests are actually testing something that matters.
Read Product Driven, the bookI have shipped products where the test suite ran green and the customer hit the bug anyway. Good QA is not the team that runs the tests. It is the team that knows what to test for, and that judgment is the part AI cannot replace.
Dedicated QA engineers, starting at $35 an hour
That rate covers a senior QA engineer in the Philippines working full-time on your product, with payroll, benefits, HR, and equipment all handled by Full Scale. The same role hired locally in the US runs $110K to $160K a year for a senior SDET, and that math is what drives most of our clients to call.
- Full-time, dedicated QA engineer
- Pre-vetted on Playwright, manual test design, and bug triage
- Works your hours, your tools, your CI pipeline
- Payroll, HR, equipment, benefits handled by us
- US-based account manager you can escalate to
- Two-week money-back guarantee if it isn't a fit
Full Scale has made the Inc. 5000 five years in a row and is Great Place to Work certified. We have been doing this since 2018, and pricing isn't the only reason clients stay with our software testing company, it's the easiest reason to call.
The reason offshore QA works here
You can also hire dedicated developers in the Philippines across every stack we staff, alongside QA, with the same vetting bar, retention numbers, and engagement model.
English-fluent by default
The Philippines is the third-largest English-speaking country in the world. Bug reports, repro steps, and standup updates read the way they would from any US team member.
Real time-zone overlap
Most of our QA engineers shift their hours toward the US business day, giving 3-4 hours of real-time overlap with East and West Coast teams, so triage conversations, release sign-offs, and dev-handoff happen live during shared hours rather than crawling through 24-hour async loops.
Deep QA talent pool
Cebu and Manila produce thousands of CS and IT graduates a year. The Philippines also has more than two decades of BPO and software QA history, which means deep ready talent across manual testing, automation, performance, and SDET roles.
Cultural alignment with US teams
Filipino QA engineers grow up on US business norms, US software products, and US engineering culture, so direct feedback, written bug reports, and async collaboration feel familiar from day one. These teams integrate fast rather than needing constant management.
Clicking through a checklist is not the same as owning quality
Anyone who can open a browser can run a manual test pass. Building a QA function that holds up under real release pressure requires a different bench entirely. When you outsource software testing or hire offshore QA engineers, this is the gap that decides whether the work catches the bugs that matter or just clears the queue. Here is what we test for, and what most offshore QA shops skip.
Exploratory testing that catches what scripts miss
Junior testers run the test cases someone else wrote and call it QA. Senior QA engineers do exploratory passes that surface the bugs the test plan never thought to look for. We hire for testers who have a documented track record of finding production bugs that automation missed.
Real Playwright fluency over record-and-replay
We test for automation engineers who can write maintainable Playwright suites by hand: page objects, fixtures, traces, parallelization, sharding in CI, and visual diffs. Most offshore QA shops still record-and-replay clicks in a brittle tool that breaks the next time a button moves.
Bug reports that engineers can actually act on
A bug report without exact repro steps, environment details, expected vs. actual, and a video or trace is a complaint, not a bug report. We screen for QA engineers who write reports the dev team can fix without three rounds of follow-up. This is the part that makes or breaks the offshore handoff.
Test plans tied to the actual spec
We test for QA engineers who can read a requirements doc or a Figma file and write a test plan that maps to the acceptance criteria, the edge cases, and the failure modes the spec quietly missed. Most offshore testers wait for someone to hand them a checklist. Ours produce the checklist.
Risk-based prioritization beats chasing coverage
Real QA is about deciding what to test first, what to test deeply, and what to skip on a tight release window. Senior testers can defend a coverage call to product and engineering. Junior testers chase 100% coverage on the wrong things and miss the regression that ships.
Owns the quality bar at release sign-off
The best QA engineers push back when a feature is not ready for QA, when a release should be held for a known issue, or when a flaky test is hiding a real bug. We hire for testers who can hold a position in a release meeting and defend the call they make.
Hire dedicated QA engineers for the work that actually catches bugs
Most QA hiring conversations skip past the actual work. Do you need a senior manual tester who can own exploratory passes and release sign-off, an automation engineer who can stand up a Playwright suite from scratch, a performance specialist who can load test your APIs, or all of the above on the same team? As an offshore software testing company that bills for hours rather than fixed-bid projects, our QA engineers ship across all of it. Here are the QA services we get hired for most often.
Playwright automation and end-to-end testing
Playwright is the default for new automation work. Our QA engineers write maintainable suites with page objects, fixtures, and traces, run them in CI across chromium, firefox, and webkit, and shard them so a full regression pass fits inside the release window. We migrate teams off legacy Cypress, Selenium, or record-and-replay tools when the existing suite has stopped paying for itself.
Manual and exploratory testing
Real users do not follow a script. Senior manual testers on the bench run structured test passes against the acceptance criteria and unstructured exploratory passes against the parts of the product that automation cannot reach: visual regressions, content-layout edge cases, multi-step user journeys, and the stuff a PM forgot to spec. Bug reports come with video, traces, and exact repro steps.
Performance and load testing
Load testing with k6, JMeter, or Gatling against your real APIs. We model traffic patterns from production, run sustained load and spike tests, and report on the latency, throughput, and error rates that actually matter for your SLOs. Performance specialists on our bench have shipped load testing programs for fintech APIs, ticketing systems, and SaaS platforms.
API and security-aware testing
Contract testing, schema validation, and security-aware QA on REST and GraphQL APIs. Our QA engineers work in Postman, RestAssured, and Playwright API tests, and they know how to catch the unauthorized access, broken object level authorization, and input validation issues that show up on every OWASP top 10. We coordinate with dedicated penetration testing partners when the project needs it.
Mobile QA on iOS and Android
Native iOS and Android testing on the same bench. Mobile QA engineers cover device matrices, gesture flows, push notification paths, deep links, and the platform-specific edge cases that only show up on a real device. They work with Appium, XCUITest, Espresso, and Playwright for mobile web on top of full manual passes on real hardware.
QA strategy and test infrastructure
Standing up a real QA function: defining the test strategy, picking the tooling, building the CI pipeline for tests, designing the bug triage workflow, and writing the documentation that lets the next QA hire ramp in days instead of weeks. This is the work most offshore shops skip because it does not bill by the script.
Eight QA specializations, one staffing partner
Most product teams need more than one role. Hire dedicated manual testers, Playwright automation engineers, SDETs, and performance specialists from a single vetted bench. Mix and match seniorities as the project requires.
Manual QA Engineers
Senior manual testers who own exploratory passes, structured regression runs, and release sign-off. Strong at writing test plans from a Figma file or spec, finding the bugs automation cannot reach, and filing reports the dev team can fix without follow-up.
Playwright Automation Engineers
Automation specialists who write maintainable Playwright suites with page objects, fixtures, and CI integration. They have shipped suites that run in under 10 minutes across chromium, firefox, and webkit, and they migrate teams off legacy Cypress and Selenium codebases.
SDETs (Software Development Engineers in Test)
Engineers who write production-grade code in the same language as your app and use it to test it. They build test frameworks, harnesses, and tooling, and they own the boundary between unit, integration, and end-to-end coverage. Polyglot in TypeScript, Python, Java, and C#.
Performance Test Engineers
Specialists in load, stress, and soak testing with k6, JMeter, and Gatling. They model production traffic, report on latency and throughput against your SLOs, and partner with engineering to fix the bottlenecks the tests find rather than throwing reports over a wall.
Mobile QA Engineers
Native iOS and Android testers who cover device matrices, gesture flows, push notifications, deep links, and platform edge cases. Fluent in Appium, XCUITest, Espresso, and real-device testing on Sauce Labs and BrowserStack.
API and Security-Aware Testers
QA engineers who can test REST and GraphQL APIs at the contract and schema level, and who know enough about the OWASP top 10 to catch the broken access control and input validation bugs that show up before a real security audit.
QA Automation Architects
Senior engineers who design the entire QA pipeline: tool selection, framework architecture, CI/CD integration, parallelization, reporting, flake mitigation, and the documentation that keeps the next hire productive. They are the people you hire when you want a real QA function, not a checklist.
QA Leads and Test Managers
QA leadership for product teams big enough to need it: defining the test strategy, owning release sign-off, partnering with product and engineering on quality gates, and managing a pod of testers. The people who turn a group of testers into a real QA team.
QA expertise tuned to your industry
As a software testing company that has been around for over a decade, we have placed dedicated QA engineers into nearly every industry that ships software. Domain knowledge cuts onboarding time in half, so we match testers to projects where they have already shipped real coverage.
SaaS & Scale-ups
B2B SaaS QA is our home turf. QA engineers on the bench have shipped Playwright suites for onboarding flows, admin consoles, billing pipelines, and dashboards on multi-tenant platforms at every scale from seed-stage to public companies. They understand role-based access testing, tenant isolation, and what enterprise buyers expect to see in a SOC 2 audit.
Playwright by default, plus every other tool QA needs
Playwright is the default for new browser automation work, and most of our QA engineers ship in it daily. Whether you want to hire QA testers for a manual program, hire automation engineers to stand up a Playwright suite, or outsource software testing on a legacy Selenium codebase that needs a rewrite, the bench covers every layer of the stack. Pick what you need. We will match a QA engineer fluent in it.
Hire dedicated QA engineers, two ways
Most clients start with a single dedicated QA engineer and grow into a full QA team. When you hire an offshore testing team this way, you get full-time testers in the Philippines who sit on your standups, work your hours, and ship coverage against your release calendar. Both options are staff augmentation at the core: dedicated, long-term QA engineers embedded in your team rather than freelancers, shared resources, or a project shop on the side.
Dedicated QA engineer
Full-time, exclusive, sits on your standups.
- Full-time QA engineer assigned only to your project
- Works your hours, your tools, your CI pipeline
- Joins your standups, reports to your engineering lead
- We handle payroll, HR, equipment, retention
- Two-week money-back guarantee
Dedicated QA team
A full offshore testing team, embedded as one pod.
- 2-10 QA engineers staffed together as one pod
- Mix of manual, automation, SDET, and performance roles
- Operates as a QA team inside your product org
- Scale up or down by a head with 30 days notice
- Account manager you can escalate to in the US
How to hire a dedicated QA engineer from Full Scale
We skip the 3-6 week recruitment cycle and the cold sourcing entirely. Our bench of senior QA engineers in the Philippines has already been through our vetting process, and every step below has a named owner on our side.
Discovery call
30 minutes with our team. We learn your product, your release cadence, the seniority level you need, and whether you want a manual tester, automation engineer, SDET, or performance specialist. We don't pitch on the call, we walk through what you actually need from a hire.
QA engineer match
We pull 1-3 pre-vetted QA engineers from the bench whose stack, seniority, and prior product experience line up with what you described. You see their full case studies, test plan samples, and Playwright code if it's relevant.
Technical interview
You interview the candidates the way you would interview any senior hire: portfolio walkthrough, a real bug-hunt exercise on a sample app, a system design conversation about test strategy, and a code review of Playwright or pytest if you want one. Pass anyone you don't believe in.
Contract & onboarding
Sign once. We handle every contract, payroll, equipment, and HR detail in the Philippines so you don't have an offshore entity to manage. You just get a QA engineer.
First test plan shipped
Your QA engineer joins your standups, gets access to your repo and CI pipeline, and ships their first test plan or automation script in week one. Our delivery managers stay involved to make sure ramp-up doesn't stall.
Full Scale vs the other ways to hire a QA engineer
Every hiring path has trade-offs. Here is how a dedicated QA engineer from our software testing company compares against the alternatives most teams consider first when they want to hire QA engineers.
| Feature | Full Scale | Freelancer / Upwork | Testing agency | US recruiter / FTE hire |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Pre-vetted senior QA bench | ||||
| Playwright fluency by default | varies | |||
| Time to first hire | 7 days | 1-3 days | 2-4 weeks | 6-12 weeks |
| Dedicated full-time, not shared | ||||
| Founder-led product oversight | ||||
| Sits on your standups, your tools | ||||
| Long-term retention | 93%+ | low | varies | varies |
| Two-week money-back guarantee | ||||
| Handles payroll, HR, equipment | ||||
| US-based account management | n/a | |||
| Typical fully-loaded cost vs US | ~40-50% | varies | ~70-90% | 100% |
When offshore QA is the wrong call
Most pages like this would tell you offshore QA is always the right move. It is not. Below are the cases where we have either passed on a project ourselves or told the client they should not hire dedicated testers from anyone, us included. If any of these match what you are doing, we will say so on the discovery call rather than sign you up and hope it works out.
You don't have a real release cadence yet
Very early stage exploration where the product changes weekly is the wrong fit for a dedicated QA engineer. What you need is the founding engineer running smoke tests by hand. A long-term QA hire needs accumulated product context to be productive, and that context is exactly what you do not have yet.
Your work is genuinely on-soil regulated
Certain DoD contracts, ITAR-covered systems, and a narrow slice of regulated workloads require US persons on US soil. If your test data touches classified systems or PII flows in those domains, we will tell you on the call, not after the contract.
The scope is fixed and short
Think a one-week regression sweep, a single mobile app certification pass, or a short audit of an existing test suite. Hire a freelance contractor or a specialist QA agency for those. Dedicated QA engineers earn their value over months and years, and a short fixed-scope job rarely runs long enough to pay back the ramp-up.
You can't actually fill a QA engineer's time
If you only have 10 hours of well-defined test work a week, a dedicated full-time QA engineer will end up idle or pulled into work you didn't budget for. That ends badly for both sides. Part-time engagements and fractional QA hires exist for this reason, and we are not them.
Real QA engineers, named and vetted
A sample of the QA engineers on our team. These are real Full Scale developers working remotely from across the Philippines, and you'll meet candidates like them during your interview round.
A QA engineer who ships production work with Selenium, Manual Testing, and Automation Testing.
A senior QA engineer with 16 years of experience across Selenium, Manual Testing, and Automation Testing.
A QA engineer who ships production work with Manual Testing, Test Case Management, and Test Planning.
A senior QA engineer with 7 years of experience across Manual Testing, Automation Testing, and Test Case Management.
A senior QA engineer with 8 years of experience across Playwright, Manual Testing, and Automation Testing.
A senior QA engineer with 7 years of experience across Manual Testing, Automation Testing, and Test Design.
The numbers behind a QA staffing partner that actually works
From the people we actually staff teams for
Full Scale's team was pivotal in elevating our facility management software. Their expertise turned complex challenges into seamless functionalities, enhancing user experience and operational efficiency.
Other than the fact that they're not physically here with us, you would think that they've always been working with us.
Deeper guides to product hiring and QA
Offshore software testing
How offshore QA scales test coverage without slowing your releases.
Software testing in the Philippines
Why the Philippines is a strong base for senior QA and test talent.
Nearshore vs offshore
When each model wins, from a CEO who has run both.
Outsourcing vs offshoring
The distinction most CTOs get wrong, and why it matters.
What offshore development really costs
The real numbers behind offshore rates and total cost.
The ROI of offshore development
The math behind 50-70% development cost reductions.
Everything you wanted to know about hiring QA engineers
Hire a dedicated QA engineer who has actually shipped quality before
Book a 30-minute discovery call with the software testing company that supplies dedicated QA engineers and full software testing services from the Philippines. We'll learn what you're building, walk you through which manual testers, Playwright automation engineers, SDETs, or performance specialists are on the bench, and you'll meet candidates within a week. You won't get pressure or a sales pitch on the call.