Lead Test Automation Engineer

Project overview

About the Opportunity

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.

About the Role

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, DevOps, architecture, business subject matter experts and QA teams to improve test coverage, reliability, performance and release confidence.

Responsibilities

Required Qualifications

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. Apply today with your up-to-date resume.

• Lead, mentor, and provide technical direction to automation engineers, test engineers, analysts, and interns, and act as the automation subject matter expert across delivery teams.
• Own the automation strategy, including framework design, tooling decisions, coding standards, and consistent adoption of quality engineering best practices.
• Stay hands-on designing, building, and maintaining scalable automated tests across API, UI, integration, functional, regression, smoke, performance, and reliability testing, including code reviews and debugging.
• Own CI/CD integration, framework health, and execution reliability, and continuously improve efficiency, maintainability, and speed.
• Define and track meaningful metrics such as coverage, stability, failure trends, and test effectiveness, and lead root-cause analysis to prevent recurring issues.
• Partner with development, QA, DevOps, architecture, product, business, and vendor teams, and communicate automation health, risks, and recommendations to technical and nontechnical stakeholders.
• Help build an inclusive culture where every team member feels valued and different perspectives are welcomed.
• 8+ years of test automation or quality engineering experience, including hands-on work building and maintaining automation across multiple applications or services.
• Proven experience leading and mentoring automation engineers.
• Strong experience designing and governing scalable frameworks, with advanced skills in modern tools such as Playwright.
• Strong API testing experience with Postman, REST services, JSON, and related validation frameworks.
• Experience integrating tests into CI/CD pipelines and applying DevOps practices, including environment management and pipeline optimization, for cloud applications on AWS, Azure, or GCP.
• Broad knowledge of testing types (functional through performance and reliability) and strong debugging and root-cause analysis skills across distributed systems.
• Strong communication and stakeholder-influencing skills, with a proactive mindset of owning automation strategy and continuous improvement.

Project details

• Start: flexible
• Remote: remote
• Location: New York, NY, USA, US