Automation Engineer I

SpotHero•Chicago, IL

17h•$88,000 - $110,000•Onsite

About The Position

SpotHero is seeking an Automation Engineer to join one of our engineering teams within the Quality Guild. This role blends hands-on manual testing with the writing and long-term maintenance of automated test suites, working shoulder-to-shoulder with backend, frontend, and mobile engineers to keep our releases fast and reliable as SpotHero scales. As an Automation Engineer, you'll be embedded in a team, participating in all of its ceremonies and reporting into that teams’ structure, while also staying closely connected to our central Automation team and the broader Quality Guild. You'll split your time between manual testing and building/maintaining automated coverage.

Requirements

Experience writing and maintaining automated tests with Playwright (or a comparable framework such as Cypress, Selenium, or WebdriverIO).
Working proficiency in JavaScript/TypeScript or Python.
Hands-on manual QA experience including functional, regression, exploratory, and/or black-box testing.
Comfort working in Git/GitHub and collaborating through pull requests and code review.
Familiarity with Jira/Confluence-based Scrum workflows.
Strong communication skills. You can clearly represent the state of testing to both engineers and non-technical stakeholders.
A collaborative mindset: this role sits at the intersection of a team, the Quality Guild, and the central Automation team, and success depends on strong relationships across all three.

Nice To Haves

Experience with CI/CD pipelines (we use Concourse) and integrating automated tests into them.
Experience with TestRail or similar test-management/reporting integrations.
Experience with backend testing against a Django/Python monolith or Go/Kotlin services.
Interest in AI-assisted testing tooling (e.g., self-healing tests, LLM-assisted authoring).
Prior experience as a QA Analyst or SDET.

Responsibilities

Own and maintain all automated tests belonging to your team, keeping them consistently green and remediating failures quickly in collaboration with team members.
Identify automation opportunities as new functionality ships, and write new end-to-end and integration tests in Playwright to cover it.
Perform manual QA testing alongside automation work; exploratory testing, edge-case discovery, and release validation with backend and frontend engineers.
Represent automation work as planned work in Jira/Scrum, keeping it visible alongside the rest of the team's sprint commitments.
Communicate the state of your team's test coverage regularly to your team, the Quality Guild, and the Automation team, with a documented, historical view of progress.
Contribute to our shared automation dashboards and monthly Automation Test Review, helping track test-suite growth, flaky/failing tests, and coverage trends over time.
Give feedback to the central Automation team on the platforms, tooling, and processes SDETs maintain, surfacing bottlenecks you hit in day-to-day work.
Partner with the Automation team on emerging tooling, such as CI-integrated continuous testing pipelines and AI-assisted test maintenance.
Write, run, and maintain automated tests in Playwright (migrating legacy web tests where applicable).
Keep test suites healthy. Failing tests should not sit red for more than a sprint, trending toward no more than a week as you grow in the role.
Contribute to observability tooling (e.g., Grafana dashboards) that gives the team and Quality Guild visibility into automation health.
Execute manual test plans for new features and releases, especially where automated coverage doesn't yet exist.
Identify edge cases and collaborate with engineers to resolve them before release.
Participate fully in your team's ceremonies (planning, refinement, retros, stand-ups) as a core member.
Maintain a rolling roadmap of what areas of functionality you plan to automate, feeding into your team's quarterly planning.
Represent your team in Quality Guild and Automation team forums, including the monthly Automation Test Review.