I'm a little confused... You describe a small team, interesting projects, wide technical leeway but the specific job your advertising here is one in QA... that person won't actually be able to exercise 'from scratch' development other than a test bed for QA...?
We basically need a developer who can own QA, but we expect this person would also have opportunities to do from scratch development on some of our projects too. It's a hybrid role that requires just the right person, which is why we are reaching out here. What we are looking to avoid is someone who "puts up with" the QA because they are interested in the software development side of things. We would really like a QA person who also wants to dabble just a bit in regular "from scratch" development.