Test Automation Engineer

Position Overview

We are looking for a Test Automation Engineer to help drive our overall quality engineering and test automation strategy. This is a senior individual contributor role with a strong emphasis on automation, technical leadership, and establishing scalable testing practices across the engineering organization.

The ideal candidate is a hands-on QA engineer who can build and improve automation while also stepping back to look at the bigger picture. This person will help define automation standards, identify the right testing approaches across different layers of the application, and establish a test strategy that improves quality without slowing down delivery.

While some manual and exploratory testing will still be part of the role, the primary focus will be test automation, framework development, and quality strategy.

Key Responsibilities

• Define and help drive the overall test automation strategy across applications and engineering teams.
• Establish standards, patterns, and best practices for scalable and maintainable automated testing.
• Design, build, enhance, and maintain automation frameworks and supporting test infrastructure.
• Determine the appropriate balance of unit, API/service, integration, end-to-end, and UI automation.
• Partner with Engineering, Product, DevOps, and other stakeholders to incorporate quality throughout the software development lifecycle.
• Review existing automation practices and identify opportunities to improve test coverage, reliability, maintainability, and execution speed.
• Provide technical leadership and guidance to QA engineers while remaining a hands-on individual contributor.
• Help teams determine what should be automated, at what level, and when, rather than relying primarily on UI or end-to-end automation.
• Integrate automated testing into CI/CD pipelines and provide fast, actionable feedback on software quality.
• Investigate test failures, flaky tests, and quality issues and help address underlying causes.
• Define quality metrics and use testing results and defect trends to identify gaps and guide improvements.
• Participate in exploratory and manual testing when appropriate, particularly for complex functionality and areas not suited for automation.
• Influence testing architecture and engineering practices across multiple projects or teams.

Qualifications

• Extensive experience in software quality engineering, QA automation, or SDET roles.
• Experience operating at a Senior, Lead, Principal, or Staff-level scope, including influencing testing practices beyond an individual project.
• Strong hands-on experience designing and developing automated tests and automation frameworks.
• Experience testing modern web applications, APIs/services, and distributed systems.
• Strong understanding of testing methodologies, automation architecture, and software quality principles.
• Experience developing automation using one or more modern programming languages such as Java, JavaScript/TypeScript, Python, or C#.
• Experience with modern automation frameworks and tools.
• Strong API testing and integration testing experience.
• Experience integrating automated tests into CI/CD pipelines.
• Ability to evaluate an existing QA environment and develop a practical automation roadmap rather than simply adding more automated tests.
• Strong debugging and root-cause-analysis skills.
• Ability to collaborate effectively with developers, QA engineers, product teams, and technical leadership.
• Strong communication skills with the ability to establish standards and influence engineering teams without requiring direct management authority.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience building or significantly modernizing an automation framework from the ground up.
• Experience establishing automation standards across multiple engineering teams.
• Experience developing organization-level or platform-level test strategies.
• Knowledge of performance, reliability, security, or other non-functional testing approaches.
• Experience improving testability within application architecture.
• Experience mentoring QA/SDET engineers and reviewing automation architecture and code.
• Experience working in Agile environments with frequent software releases.