Test Automation Engineering Lead

Avaya

5d•$179,127 - $234,100•Remote

About The Position

As a Player-Coach Test Engineering Lead, you will lead a geographically distributed test engineering team while remaining a hands-on architect, coder and troubleshooter. You will own the engineering of a CI/CD-native quality system for cloud-based voice, media and contact-center platforms, covering functional automation, protocol- and traffic-level validation, synthetic monitoring, performance and chaos engineering. You will also transform conventional QA into an AI-enabled, continuously validating engineering capability. This is a player-coach role in a fast-paced, startup-like environment, not a coordination-only test management position.

Requirements

10+ years in software/test engineering or quality engineering, including meaningful technical leadership of remote or globally distributed engineers, and demonstrable current hands-on coding.
Strong Python, TypeScript/JavaScript or equivalent programming; Playwright and API/integration automation; testing architecture; maintainable frameworks; and CI/CD integration.
Hands-on load and performance tooling such as k6, Gatling, JMeter or Locust, including measurement interpretation and systems-level bottleneck investigation.
Production or lab experience testing real-time voice/media or contact-center systems; ability to inspect SIP/RTP/WebRTC/HTTP traffic and reason about customer-visible outcomes.
Cloud-native proficiency with Kubernetes, Linux, networking, TLS, DNS, ingress/API gateways, distributed systems and observability stacks.
Experience applying AI coding tools or agentic workflows to real test engineering work, with validation and security controls.
Ability to make pragmatic technical decisions and deliver iteratively under changing priorities without sacrificing reliability.
Bachelor degree or equivalent experience.
Currently authorized to work in the United States without the need for visa sponsorship now or in the future.

Nice To Haves

Experience with Azure, GCP or AWS; Terraform, Helm, Argo CD/GitOps; Kafka, Redis, relational/document databases and event-driven architectures.
Experience with telephony and contact-center technology, including SBCs, codecs, jitter, packet loss, MOS, call flows, dial plans, IVR and agent desktop.
Experience with policy-gated autonomous remediation, MCP/tool orchestration, AI agent evaluation and protected test-data handling.
Engineering experience in regulated environments with traceability and evidence supporting FedRAMP, PCI DSS or SOC 2.

Responsibilities

Lead, mentor and grow a remote/distributed automation team; establish standards, technical direction, code review, delivery accountability and a visible engineering backlog while contributing production-quality code.
Architect and implement Playwright-based UI/API automation, contract and integration tests, service-level tests, and end-to-end customer journeys. Select complementary tools for protocols and real-time media where browser automation is insufficient.
Embed tests into GitHub Actions, Jenkins, Argo CD and GitOps delivery gates, including pull-request checks, ephemeral environments, deployment verification, risk-based suites, release qualifications and fast failure feedback.
Build reliable voice, media and contact-center test harnesses covering SIP signaling, RTP/SRTP media, WebRTC, IVR, agent interactions, call routing, conferencing, transfers, hold/resume, recording and messaging where applicable.
Engineer continuous traffic generation and synthetic journeys across calling, messaging and API workflows; correlate functional outcomes with signaling traces, media quality, logs, infrastructure and service telemetry.
Own performance engineering, including workload modeling, load/stress/soak testing, concurrency, throughput, queue depth, latency, resource saturation, capacity limits and customer-experience thresholds.
Introduce chaos and fault-injection scenarios such as node failures, network impairment, dependency loss, rate limiting, failover and degraded media, with explicit blast-radius and rollback safeguards.
Build agentic workflows for test generation, execution orchestration, flaky-test diagnosis, selective retesting, impact analysis, root-cause hints and self-healing pipelines; require auditable, reviewed repairs rather than silent assertion weakening.
Drive observability-led troubleshooting using Prometheus, Grafana, Loki, Thanos, Alloy, OpenTelemetry, traces, packet captures and traffic analysis; debug failures across browser, API, network, Kubernetes, services and databases.
Partner with platform, SRE, CloudOps, application engineering, security and release teams on security, zero trust, FedRAMP/PCI DSS/SOC 2 evidence, test-data protection and release readiness.