16.05.2024
Stefan Antov, QA Automation Team Lead at TINQIN, believes the answer lies in something more profound than tooling or test coverage: mentorship. With over 15 years in software quality engineering, Stefan leads a growing QA organization focused on validation and teaching others how to think like quality owners.
Product quality isn’t negotiable in high-stakes industries like insurance and health tech—it’s a business differentiator. But how do you ensure quality at scale, especially while growing teams, onboarding new engineers, and evolving product complexity? We sat with him to explore how mentorship, structure, and strategic QA enable TINQIN to scale software delivery without sacrificing quality.
“Mentorship isn’t just knowledge transfer. It’s cultural alignment and risk mitigation,” says Stefan.
TINQIN’s QA team includes over 35 manual and automation engineers. As the company rapidly expands its delivery footprint, onboarding and mentorship have become embedded components of product readiness. New QA engineers don’t just join projects—they’re guided through:
“In a sector like insurance, miscommunication between dev and QA doesn’t lead to bugs—it leads to breaches of trust. That’s why mentorship matters.”
TINQIN’s hiring philosophy centers on long-term potential, not just technical fluency.
“We look for mindset first,” Stefan explains. “Frameworks change. But people who are proactive, pragmatic, and communicative—those who grow into our ecosystem.”
Mentorship is also used as a buffer during scale-up. As new engineers join, experienced team leads support them through structured onboarding, code and test reviews, and sprint-level retrospectives—avoiding the costly dip in quality that often accompanies rapid growth.
Stefan believes that the best QA engineers don’t just execute test cases—they shape product development through early feedback, architecture awareness, and system intuition.
“The goal is to cultivate ownership—people who ask why, not just how.”
Mentorship at TINQIN focuses on:
TINQIN’s QA automation stack includes:
But Stefan quickly points out that tools serve strategy, not vice versa.
“We build frameworks that are maintainable by the team, align with our dev stack, and can be taught easily to new hires. Simplicity scales better than cleverness.”
For CTOs evaluating engineering partners, QA maturity can be a revealing differentiator. At TINQIN, QA is a collaborative force embedded across delivery squads.
“The best QA strategy is one that the entire team understands and supports. That’s how you embed quality into delivery—not after it.”
Stefan Antov, Automation QA Leader, TINQIN
Final Word: Mentorship as Infrastructure
TINQIN’s QA mentorship program is a core mechanism for delivering stability, team growth, and cultural continuity.
For CTOs, this means:
