Lead Test Automation Engineer
About The Position
The team is focused on building and maturing automated testing capabilities that enable faster, higher-quality software delivery across Symetra. This role will lead a small team of automation engineers while working cross-functionally with engineering, product, DevOps, architecture, and business partners. The environment is highly collaborative, with an emphasis on innovation, continuous improvement, and implementing scalable automation solutions that increase release confidence and support business-critical applications. The Lead Test Automation Engineer is a hands-on technical leader responsible for guiding a team of 2–3 automation engineers and advancing automation maturity across complex applications and delivery teams. This role leads the design, development, and ongoing improvement of scalable test automation frameworks, environments, and CI/CD integrations. The individual works with minimal supervision and partners closely with engineering, product, DevOps, architecture, business subject matter experts, and QA teams to improve test coverage, reliability, performance, and release confidence.
Requirements
- Eight or more 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, Cypress, Selenium, or Pytest.
- 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 DevOps 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, DevOps, 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.
Nice To Haves
- Experience with Python, Pytest, and Postman.
- Experience with Playwright or Cypress.
- Experience with Azure DevOps pipelines or GitHub Actions.
- Experience testing AWS-based applications, including serverless or container-based solutions.
- Experience with performance and reliability testing.
- Experience contributing to new solution design and architecture.
- Experience defining automation metrics and communicating quality and delivery risk to leadership.
Responsibilities
- 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, execution reliability, and communication of 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, DevOps, 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.
Benefits
- Flexible full-time or hybrid telecommuting arrangements
- 401(k) plan with immediate vesting and company matching up to 6%
- Paid time away including vacation and sick time, flex days and ten paid holidays
- Company matching for community contributions
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Senior
Education Level
No Education Listed
