Senior QA Automation Engineer

Toyota Connected Europe•Swoyersville, PA

2h•Hybrid

About The Position

Toyota Connected Europe is expanding its engineering presence in Wrocław as part of Toyota’s transformation into a mobility services company. This role offers the opportunity to help establish the new engineering team and contribute to its working practices and engineering culture while building connected mobility products at scale in an international environment. The Senior QA Automation Engineer owns the end-to-end quality approach for a product area as part of a team-wide quality responsibility. The work combines test design, manual and exploratory testing, automation, and collaboration with product and engineering colleagues. The engineer selects testing approaches according to risk, defines quality gates and metrics, evolves Java-based BDD frameworks, and helps others improve their testing practices. The role emphasizes proactive defect detection, reliable and deterministic automation, continuous improvement, investigation of failures at their source, and advocacy for customer-focused quality. The position is hybrid, with a minimum of six onsite days per month in Wrocław. The advertised seniority may be adjusted during the hiring process; applicants who are still growing toward senior level are also encouraged to apply.

Requirements

Strong test design skills, including risk-based, boundary, and negative-path testing.
Proven hands-on manual and structured exploratory testing experience, with clear defect reporting.
Ability to explain why a risk is best covered manually or through automation.
Experience selecting a risk-based test approach for a product or feature and defining quality gates and metrics.
Ability to define or review acceptance criteria with product owners and developers and turn them into test scenarios.
Solid hands-on experience writing Gherkin (Given/When/Then) using Karate, Cucumber, or a similar tool.
Strong working knowledge of Java, including object-oriented programming, collections, and exception handling, and ability to design, extend, and refactor test frameworks and utilities.
Experience testing RESTful services, including HTTP status codes, authentication, payload validation, JSON/XML path expressions, and SQL.
Experience testing asynchronous or message-based systems such as Kafka, RabbitMQ, or SQS, including data integrity across services.
Experience owning test automation in GitLab CI or a similar system, using Git flow, and reviewing merge requests.
Experience reviewing others’ testing work and coaching colleagues on testing practices.
Ability to work autonomously, plan and prioritize work, and support and guide team members.
Ability to collaborate across Product, Development, and QA, using BDD to help teams share a common language.
Ability to explain complex technical failures clearly to non-technical stakeholders.

Nice To Haves

Performance and resilience testing experience, such as Gatling or K6.
Experience supporting product owners with user acceptance testing (UAT).
Contract testing experience, such as Pact.
Mocking or service virtualisation experience, such as WireMock or Karate mocks.
Cloud experience with AWS or Azure and observability experience with Datadog.
Python experience, including Behave, or UI automation experience with Selenium.
Experience with Maven or Gradle and Postman.
Experience using AI tools in testing while critically evaluating their output.
ISTQB certification.
Deep expertise in automation and CI, including framework architecture, test layering, pipeline strategy, or managing flakiness at scale; or in quality approach and coaching, including risk-based test planning, quality metrics, or coaching on testing.

Responsibilities

Select a risk-based testing approach for the product area, deciding what to test manually or automate and at which layer, and define what constitutes completion.
Define and track quality gates and metrics.
Lead refinement from a quality perspective; challenge stories, define or review acceptance criteria with product owners and developers, and translate criteria into executable Gherkin specifications.
Write clean, maintainable, deterministic tests in Java-based BDD frameworks, including Java helpers and utilities.
Conduct manual and exploratory testing to uncover risks not covered by automation.
Design and automate tests for REST APIs and event-driven or asynchronous flows, including ordering, duplicates, retries, idempotency, dead-letter queues, and eventual consistency.
Own and evolve test automation frameworks and utilities, including frameworks using Karate and Cucumber with REST Assured.
Own test suites and their GitLab CI integration in collaboration with DevOps; address flakiness and execution time and make results visible to stakeholders.
Investigate test failures by analysing logs, tracing requests (for example, with Datadog), and inspecting data to distinguish product defects from test, environment, or data issues.
Review test code and merge requests, review colleagues’ testing work, and coach developers and testers on good testing practices.
Analyse test metrics and execution times to improve testing cycles and remove waste.
Signal systemic quality risks and recurring flaky tests, and prioritize resolving them over adding new feature scripts.
Support and guide others in the team while planning and prioritizing work autonomously.