Senior QA Automation Engineer

About the team:

We are building a new QA automation capability for a large, mature application with more than 20 years of development history. We are looking for a Senior QA Automation Engineer to play a key role in establishing the technical foundation, engineering standards, and automated test coverage that will support the application going forward.

This is a hands-on engineering position for someone who enjoys both building automation systems and using them to solve real testing problems. You will work with the QA Automation Manager and other team members to design and evolve our automation framework, establish scalable patterns and practices, and develop automated coverage for critical application functionality.

What we are looking for:

• Help design, build, and evolve the foundational architecture of our QA automation framework using TypeScript and Playwright.
• Establish scalable patterns for test organization, reusable components, fixtures, configuration, environment management, reporting, and execution.
• Evaluate technical approaches and make pragmatic recommendations based on maintainability, reliability, performance, and long-term scalability.
• Identify and address architectural or technical issues before they become sources of significant test-suite maintenance or instability.

Automated Test Development

• Design, implement, maintain, and troubleshoot automated tests covering critical application workflows.
• Develop automation across appropriate testing layers, including end-to-end browser testing, API testing, integration testing, and database validation.
• Create reusable automation components and abstractions that make new tests easier to develop, understand, and maintain.
• Analyze automated test failures and distinguish application defects from automation, test-data, environment, and infrastructure issues.
• Balance test coverage with execution time, reliability, and long-term maintenance cost.

Automation Strategy & Quality Standards

• Help define automation standards and best practices for test structure, code organization, error handling, logging, reporting, retries, test isolation, and failure diagnostics.
• Identify high-value candidates for automation and determine the most appropriate level and approach for testing.
• Design automation with reliability and diagnosability in mind so that failures provide useful information and the test suite remains trusted by the engineering organization.
• Participate in code reviews and continuously improve the quality and maintainability of the automation codebase.

CI/CD & Test Execution

• Integrate automated testing into CI/CD pipelines and help establish effective quality gates within the software delivery lifecycle.
• Design and improve test execution strategies, including parallel execution, test selection, environment configuration, reporting, and failure analysis.
• Partner with DevOps and engineering teams to improve the reliability and efficiency of automated test execution.
• Help ensure automated test results are visible, actionable, and useful to development and QA teams.

Data Validation & Test Data Management

• Write and analyze SQL queries to validate application and database state.
• Understand and work with relational database structures and stored procedures as necessary to support testing.
• Develop reliable approaches for creating, manipulating, and cleaning up test data.
• Help establish test-data strategies that support repeatable and isolated automated execution.

Engineering Productivity & Process Automation

• Identify repetitive QA and engineering workflows that can benefit from automation.
• Develop utilities and scripts using technologies such as Node.js, PowerShell, or other appropriate tools.
• Automate supporting processes such as test setup, environment configuration, pipeline operations, data preparation, and administrative workflows where doing so provides meaningful engineering value.

Technical Leadership & Collaboration

• Provide technical guidance to other automation engineers through design discussions, code reviews, pairing, documentation, and knowledge sharing.
• Mentor less-experienced engineers and help develop the team's overall automation engineering capabilities.
• Collaborate closely with developers, QA engineers, DevOps, and other stakeholders to improve application testability and integrate automated quality practices throughout the development lifecycle.
• Clearly communicate technical decisions, tradeoffs, risks, and recommendations to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.

What you bring:

• Significant professional experience in QA automation, software development in test, or a comparable automation engineering role.
• Demonstrated experience designing, establishing, or significantly evolving an automated testing framework, rather than solely developing tests within an existing framework.
• Strong hands-on TypeScript or JavaScript development experience and a solid understanding of software engineering principles.
• Strong experience with Playwright or a comparable modern browser automation framework, with the ability to quickly develop deep expertise in Playwright.
• Experience designing and maintaining automated end-to-end and API tests.
• Strong understanding of automation architecture, reusable abstractions, test isolation, configuration management, error handling, and debugging.
• Working knowledge of SQL and relational databases, including the ability to construct queries for data validation and test setup.
• Practical experience integrating automated testing into CI/CD pipelines.
• Experience diagnosing complex automation failures across application, test, environment, data, and infrastructure layers.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills and the ability to collaborate effectively across engineering disciplines.
• Ability to work independently, take ownership of technical problems, and carry solutions from initial design through implementation and ongoing maintenance.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience introducing automation into a mature or legacy application with significant existing functionality and technical debt.
• Experience helping establish a new QA automation team, automation practice, or testing platform.
• Deep hands-on experience with Playwright, including fixtures, parallel execution, network interception/mocking, configuration, tracing, and debugging.
• Experience developing Node.js and/or PowerShell utilities and engineering automation.
• Experience working with stored procedures and complex relational database systems.
• Experience with test-data management and automated environment setup/teardown.
• Experience improving the reliability, execution time, or maintainability of a large automated regression suite.
• Experience mentoring junior or mid-level automation engineers.