Lead Test Automation Engineer

Our client, a well-established national financial services organization, is seeking an experienced Lead Test Automation Engineer to guide a small team of automation engineers and advance automation maturity across complex applications and delivery teams. This is a chance to combine hands-on technical work with real influence over automation strategy, frameworks, and tooling.

The Lead Test Automation Engineer is a hands-on technical leader responsible for guiding a team of 2-3 automation engineers. You'll lead the design, development, and ongoing improvement of scalable test automation frameworks, environments, and CI/CD integrations.

You’ll work with minimal supervision and partner closely with engineering, product, Dev Ops, architecture, business subject matter experts and QA teams to improve test coverage, reliability, performance and release confidence.

• Lead and provide technical direction to a team of automation engineers.
• Design, develop, and maintain scalable automated test strategies, frameworks, and scripts supporting API, UI, integration, functional, regression, smoke, performance, and reliability testing.
• Recommend and help standardize automation frameworks, test environments, tools, coding practices, and implementation patterns.
• Drive automation strategy, framework design, solution planning, CI/CD integration, and tooling decisions for major initiatives.
• Remain hands-on with framework development, test implementation, code reviews, debugging, and technical problem-solving.
• Mentor automation engineers, Software Test Engineers, analysts, and interns, and serve as an automation subject matter expert across delivery teams.
• Lead the consistent adoption of automation and quality engineering best practices.
• Own automation framework health, pipeline integration, and execution reliability, and communicate automation risks, gaps, and progress to leadership.
• Define and track meaningful automation metrics, including coverage, execution results, stability, failure trends, and test effectiveness.
• Lead root-cause analysis for complex automation failures, framework issues, and recurring defects, and implement improvements to prevent recurrence.
• Identify and implement improvements that increase automation efficiency, maintainability, scalability, and execution speed.
• Partner with development, QA, Dev Ops, architecture, product teams, business stakeholders, and third-party vendors to support high-quality delivery.
• Communicate technical recommendations, automation health, delivery risks, and improvement opportunities to technical and nontechnical stakeholders.
• Contribute to an inclusive culture where every team member feels valued and respected and different perspectives are welcomed.

• 8+ years of relevant test automation or quality engineering experience
• Significant hands-on experience designing, building, and maintaining automation solutions across multiple applications, products, or services
• Proven experience leading automation engineers and providing technical mentoring and guidance
• Strong experience designing and governing scalable automation frameworks, including coding standards, test strategy, framework architecture, and long-term maintainability
• Advanced experience with modern automation frameworks such as Playwright
• Strong API testing and automation experience using tools and technologies such as Postman, REST services, JSON, and related API validation frameworks
• Experience integrating automated tests into CI/CD pipelines, including pipeline design, execution controls, metrics, and governance
• Strong knowledge of functional, regression, integration, end-to-end, smoke, performance, and reliability testing
• Strong debugging, system analysis, and root-cause analysis skills, including experience diagnosing issues across distributed systems
• Solid understanding of Dev Ops practices, test environment management, pipeline optimization, and test execution efficiency
• Experience testing cloud-based applications and services in AWS, Azure, or GCP
• Demonstrated ability to work across engineering, product, Dev Ops, architecture, QA, and business teams
• Strong communication, collaboration, and stakeholder-influencing skills
• Proactive leadership mindset with ownership of automation strategy, framework quality, and continuous improvement

If you're a hands-on automation leader who enjoys building strong frameworks and developing the people around you, we'd like to hear from you.