Lead Test Automation Engineer

Oliver James Group; United States; Remote; USD 130,000 - 170,000; Full time

Job summary

Oliver James Group is seeking a Lead Test Automation Engineer to guide a small team and advance automation maturity across complex applications and delivery teams. The role combines hands-on development with strategic input on frameworks, tooling, and automation strategy.

You will partner with engineering, product, DevOps, architecture, QA, and business stakeholders to improve test coverage, reliability, and release confidence.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of test automation or quality engineering experience.
• Hands-on experience designing, building, and maintaining automation across multiple apps/products/services.
• Proven experience leading automation engineers and providing technical mentoring.

Responsibilities

• Lead and provide technical direction to a team of automation engineers.
• Design, develop, and maintain scalable automated test strategies, frameworks, and scripts for API, UI, integration, functional and performance testing.
• Drive automation strategy, framework design, CI/CD integration, and tooling decisions for major initiatives.
• Remain hands-on with framework development, test implementation, and code reviews.
• Mentor engineers and serve as automation SME across delivery teams.
• Communicate automation health, risks, and progress to leadership.

Skills

Leadership

Automation strategy

Mentoring

Debugging

Stakeholder communication

Tools

Playwright

Postman

CI/CD tooling

Job description

About the Opportunity

Our client, a well-established national financial services organization, is seeking an experienced Lead Test Automation Engineer to guide a small team of automation engineers and advance automation maturity across complex applications and delivery teams. This is a chance to combine hands-on technical work with real influence over automation strategy, frameworks, and tooling.

About the Role

The Lead Test Automation Engineer is a hands-on technical leader responsible for guiding a team of 2-3 automation engineers. You'll lead the design, development, and ongoing improvement of scalable test automation frameworks, environments, and CI/CD integrations.

You'll work with minimal supervision and partner closely with engineering, product, DevOps, architecture, business subject matter experts and QA teams to improve test coverage, reliability, performance and release confidence.

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, and execution reliability, and communicate 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 non-technical stakeholders.
• Contribute to an inclusive culture where every team member feels valued and respected and different perspectives are welcomed.

Required Qualifications

• 8+ 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
• 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