QA Automation Senior Engineer

Nalanda Global; Madrid; Remote; EUR 45,000 - 65,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Flexible working time

Teleworking

Career development opportunities

Job summary

Nalanda Global in Spain is seeking a hands-on Senior QA Automation Engineer to lead the shift from manual QA to scalable automation across product teams. You will embed in a development squad and own quality activities, building product knowledge and automating high-value scenarios.

You will establish reusable tooling, define standards, coach teams, and integrate tests into CI/CD, partnering with Tech Leaders, Platform, and DevOps to raise quality without slowing delivery.

Qualifications

• 7+ years of software quality, test engineering, or QA with hands-on automation in production.
• Experience leading a transition from manual QA to automation across multiple squads or products.
• Strong programming skills in Java and/or JavaScript/TypeScript and the ability to design maintainable test code.

Responsibilities

• Embed in an assigned product team and participate in discovery, refinement, acceptance criteria definition, risk assessment, and release planning.
• Perform exploratory, functional, integration, regression, and release testing when manual validation is fastest or safest.
• Design, implement, and maintain automated tests across UI, API, integration, contract, and service layers, choosing the right test pyramid for each risk.
• Investigate failures end to end and collaborate with engineers to resolve root causes.
• Keep automated suites reliable, readable, and maintainable by reducing flakiness and data dependencies.

Skills

Java

JavaScript/TypeScript

Quality engineering

Test automation

CI/CD

English communication

Tools

Playwright

Cypress

Selenium

JUnit

TestNG

PyTest

Git

Docker

Kubernetes

Job description

About Us

Nalanda is a leading Spanish multinational dedicated to bridging the gap between large companies and their suppliers through an innovative digital platform. Our platform streamlines business processes such as document exchange, purchases, invoices, and vital business information. We specialize in coordinating activities between contractors and their suppliers, minimizing costs, time, and risks, while fostering transparent and effective business relationships.

About Us

Nalanda is a leading Spanish multinational dedicated to bridging the gap between large companies and their suppliers through an innovative digital platform. Our platform streamlines business processes such as document exchange, purchases, invoices, and vital business information. We specialize in coordinating activities between contractors and their suppliers, minimizing costs, time, and risks, while fostering transparent and effective business relationships.

We are a dynamic, forward‑thinking company committed to building an inclusive workplace where talent thrives. At Nalanda, we believe that the development of people drives organizational success. Join us as we continue to build a culture of growth, inclusivity, and excellence.

We are also part of Once For All, an international group with a presence in the UK, France, Latin America, and more than 1,000 people working on digital solutions for supply chain management and regulatory compliance.

Role Summary

We are looking for a hands‑on Senior QA Automation Engineer to lead the progressive evolution from predominantly manual quality assurance to a scalable, sustainable automation model across several product engineering teams. You will combine strong test engineering expertise with the ability to define standards, influence teams, and turn a transformation roadmap into working automation embedded in daily delivery.

This is not a purely strategic or advisory role. You will initially be embedded in a specific development team and take direct ownership of its quality activities. That may include exploratory testing, manual regression, release validation, and defect investigation while you build product knowledge and progressively automate the highest‑value scenarios. The goal is to improve quality without slowing delivery or waiting for a perfect future‑state framework.

In parallel, you will work with QA engineers, developers, Technical Leaders, Product, and Platform teams to establish reusable tooling, clear quality ownership, measurable standards, and an adoption path that can be replicated across teams. This is a senior individual‑contributor role with broad cross‑team influence and a strong focus on coaching through hands‑on delivery.

Key responsibilities

• Embed in an assigned product team and participate in discovery, refinement, acceptance criteria definition, risk assessment, and release planning.
• Perform exploratory, functional, integration, regression, and release testing when manual validation is the fastest or safest way to protect the product.
• Design, implement, and maintain automated tests across UI, API, integration, contract, and service layers, choosing the right level of the test pyramid for each risk.
• Investigate failures end to end, distinguish product defects from automation or environment issues, and collaborate with engineers until root causes are resolved.
• Keep automated suites reliable, readable, and maintainable by controlling flakiness, execution time, duplication, and test‑data dependencies.

QA automation transformation

• Assess the current QA maturity, critical user journeys, manual regression effort, defect patterns, tools, environments, and automation coverage across product teams.
• Define a pragmatic, phased transformation roadmap with clear priorities, milestones, ownership, and expected outcomes; avoid automating low‑value scenarios simply to increase test counts.
• Establish a target quality model covering risk‑based testing, the test pyramid, shift‑left practices, Definition of Done, release criteria, quality gates, and shared accountability between QA and development.
• Build or evolve reusable automation frameworks, patterns, fixtures, test‑data strategies, mocks, service virtualization, reporting, and environment‑isolation practices that teams can adopt consistently.
• Integrate automated tests into CI/CD pipelines with fit‑for‑purpose stages, parallel execution, actionable reporting, and explicit policies for flaky or quarantined tests.
• Prioritize the automation backlog using product risk, business criticality, release frequency, defect history, execution cost, and long‑term maintenance value.
• Define and track meaningful quality indicators such as escaped defects, regression lead time, automation stability, critical‑path coverage, pipeline feedback time, and adoption by team.

Cross‑team enablement

• Coach QA engineers and developers through pairing, code reviews, examples, workshops, and practical documentation so that automation becomes a team capability rather than a single‑person dependency.
• Create lightweight standards and starter templates that teams can adopt without excessive ceremony, while allowing justified variation between products.
• Partner with Technical Leaders and Platform/DevOps teams to improve testability, environment reliability, observability, and pipeline execution.
• Act as a cross‑team reference for quality engineering, communicate trade‑offs clearly, and surface transformation risks, dependencies, and progress to technical and non‑technical stakeholders.
• Promote responsible use of AI‑assisted testing and development workflows to accelerate test design, implementation, debugging, and maintenance without weakening review or traceability.

Qualifications

• 7+ years of professional experience in software quality, test engineering, or QA, including substantial hands‑on automation work in production environments.
• Proven experience leading or materially driving a transition from manual‑heavy QA to sustainable automation across multiple squads, products, or a comparable engineering area.
• Strong programming skills in Java and/or JavaScript/TypeScript, with the ability to design maintainable test code, libraries, and frameworks rather than only record or script test cases.
• Deep hands‑on experience with modern automation tools such as Playwright, Cypress, Selenium, JUnit, TestNG, PyTest, REST Assured, or equivalent technologies.
• Experience testing RESTful APIs, microservices, asynchronous workflows, and distributed systems, including integration and contract‑testing approaches.
• Solid understanding of exploratory and manual testing, risk‑based test design, defect investigation, and release validation; willingness to perform these activities when they are required during the migration.
• Experience integrating test automation into CI/CD platforms such as GitLab CI, Jenkins, or GitHub Actions, including reporting, test selection, parallelization, and failure diagnostics.
• Working knowledge of PostgreSQL or similar SQL databases, plus familiarity with Redis or other NoSQL solutions for test setup and validation.
• Hands‑on experience with Git, Docker, and containerized test environments; familiarity with Kubernetes and cloud‑based deployments.
• Ability to define an incremental strategy, measure outcomes, and influence several teams without relying on direct reporting authority.
• Strong communication, facilitation, and coaching skills, with the judgment to balance quality, delivery speed, and long‑term maintainability.
• High proficiency in English (spoken and written), as you will work with international teams.

Bonus points for

• Experience with performance and load‑testing tools such as k6, Gatling, or JMeter.
• Experience with contract testing, mocking frameworks, service virtualization, synthetic testing, or test‑data management at scale.
• Familiarity with observability stacks such as Grafana, Prometheus, Dynatrace, and distributed tracing.
• Hands‑on experience with AWS, GCP, or Azure and cloud‑native test environments.
• Experience supporting legacy modernization, large‑scale refactoring, or platform migration initiatives.
• Experience with AI‑powered testing tools or AI‑assisted software development workflows.

What we offer

• Flexible working time.
• Teleworking.
• Intensive working time in summer.
• Flexible benefits.
• A dynamic and inclusive workplace with opportunities for growth and development.
• The chance to make a significant impact on our organizational culture and talent strategy.
• Competitive compensation package, with a salary range of €45.000 - €65.000 gross per year, depending on experience and fit.