Lead Test Automation Engineer - Scale Automation & CI/CD

Symetra; United States; Hybrid; USD 128,700 - 214,600; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

401(k) plan with company matching

Paid time away

Company matching and charitable giving

Job summary

Symetra seeks a Lead Test Automation Engineer to lead a small team of automation engineers and advance automation maturity across complex applications and delivery teams.

This role designs, develops, and maintains scalable test automation frameworks, environments, and CI/CD integrations, while collaborating with engineering, product, DevOps, architecture, and QA teams to improve test coverage, reliability, and release confidence.

Qualifications

• 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.

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.

Skills

Automation leadership

Playwright

Cypress

Selenium

Pytest

API testing

CI/CD integration

Debugging

Tools

Postman

Azure DevOps

GitHub Actions

Job description

Symetra seeks a Lead Test Automation Engineer to lead a small team of automation engineers and advance automation maturity across complex applications and delivery teams.

This role designs, develops, and maintains scalable test automation frameworks, environments, and CI/CD integrations, while collaborating with engineering, product, DevOps, architecture, and QA teams to improve test coverage, reliability, and release confidence.