QA Automation Team Lead

First Advantage; Town of Poland (NY); Hybrid; USD 140,000 - 190,000; Full time

Job summary

First Advantage is seeking a QA Automation Team Lead to provide technical leadership, elevate automation strategy, and drive quality across our distributed SaaS ecosystem. This role goes beyond hands-on automation and requires defining best practices, leading architecture, and mentoring a global QA team.

As part of the role, you will partner with product, engineering, and architecture to shape the quality roadmap, uplift testing maturity, and ensure automation integrates with CI/CD pipelines

Qualifications

• 7–10+ years of hands-on QA automation experience.
• Proven leadership in automation strategy and quality initiatives.
• Expertise with JavaScript/TypeScript-based automation.
• Experience with WebdriverIO and/or Playwright.
• Strong testing of distributed systems and microservices.

Responsibilities

• Define automation vision, roadmap, and standards across products.
• Design scalable automation frameworks and governance.
• Mentor QA engineers across locations and teams.
• Ensure CI/CD quality gates and observability practices.
• Collaborate with product and engineering to uplift testing maturity.

Tools

WebdriverIO

Playwright

JavaScript/TypeScript

Automation leadership

Distributed systems testing

API testing

CI/CD

Job description

This is a Hybrid work position, and individual will be required to report into our Kraków, Office 2-3 days per week.

We are seeking a QA Automation Team Lead to provide technical leadership, elevate automation strategy, and drive quality engineering across our modern, distributed SaaS ecosystem. This role goes beyond hands‑on automation: you will define best practices, lead automation architecture, improve engineering quality culture, and mentor global QA team to deliver reliable, scalable, and high‑performing solutions.

You’ll have significant ownership and influence, partnering with product, engineering, and architecture teams to shape our quality roadmap and uplift testing maturity across our platforms and services.

What You’ll Do

Automation Strategy & Architecture

• Define the automation vision, roadmap, and architectural standards across multiple products and services.
• Design scalable, reusable automation frameworks (UI, API, microservices, contract, and integration levels).
• Oversee automation framework consolidation, standardization, and governance across teams.
• Evaluate emerging tools and technologies to modernize our automation ecosystem.

Technical Leadership

• Mentor, coach, and upskill QA engineers across multiple locations and teams.
• Conduct technical reviews of frameworks, test design, test architecture, and automation code.
• Champion engineering best practices around observability, CI/CD quality gates, digital‑first testing, and shift‑left quality.
• Drive continuous improvement initiatives that reduce manual effort and increase automation efficiency and reliability.

Quality Ownership

• Partner with engineering leadership to define quality KPIs, metrics, and measurement frameworks.
• Ensure automation integrates effectively into CI/CD pipelines using GitHub Actions.
• Collaborate with developers, architects, and product managers to establish quality strategies, risk‑based test approaches, and acceptance criteria.
• Support exploratory, end-to-end, and UAT testing for complex scenarios where automation complements human validation

What You Bring

Core Automation & Engineering Expertise

• 7–10+ years of hands‑on QA automation or test engineering experience.
• Proven experience leading automation strategy, frameworks, or quality engineering initiatives.
• Advanced proficiency with JavaScript/TypeScript‑based automation.
• Expertise with WebdriverIO and/or Playwright (primary tools).
• Strong experience testing distributed systems, microservices architectures, API communication flows, and event‑driven platforms.

Framework & Architecture Skills

• Deep understanding of automation design patterns and scalable framework architecture (Node.js/TypeScript preferred).
• Strong knowledge of REST API testing, schema validation, and contract testing.
• Familiarity with BDD practices and tools (e.g., Cucumber).
• Understanding of observability, monitoring, and logging tools as they relate to test ecosystems.

DevOps & Tooling

• Proficiency with GitHub, GitHub Actions, pipelines, workflow orchestration, and CI/CD quality gates.
• Strong Git practices: branching strategy, code review, PR quality standards.
• Experience integrating test frameworks with cloud testing platforms (BrowserStack, Sauce Labs, etc.).

Data & Platform Knowledge

• Ability to write and interpret SQL queries.
• Working knowledge of modern web technologies (HTML, CSS, DOM).

Ways of Working

• Comfortable operating in Agile/Scrum environments.
• Strong communication and leadership skills, with an ability to influence cross‑functional teams.
• Ownership mindset with a focus on scalability, reliability, and long‑term improvements.
• Curiosity, adaptability, and commitment to elevating engineering quality.

Nice to Have

• Experience with serverless computing (AWS Lambda, Azure Functions).
• Exposure to performance testing tools (k6, Gatling).
• Understanding of accessibility testing principles (WCAG 2.1 AA).

Equal Employment Opportunities at First Advantage

First Advantage is an equal opportunity employer. We are committed to providing a workplace and recruitment process that is free from unlawful discrimination, harassment, and retaliation. Employment decisions at First Advantage are based solely on qualifications, merit, and business needs. We do not discriminate in any aspect of employment on the basis of race, color, national origin, ancestry, citizenship, religion, creed, sex, gender identity, gender expression, sexual orientation, marital or family status, pregnancy, age, physical or mental disability, medical condition, genetic information, veteran or military status, or any other characteristic protected by applicable law.