Lead Automation QA Engineer

As a Lead Automation QA Engineer, you will play a crucial role in driving test automation initiatives, ensuring product quality, and mentoring the QA team. Your deep expertise in test automation frameworks such as Playwright, Selenium, etc., along with a solid understanding of CI/CD practices, will be essential for delivering high-quality software solutions in Agile environments. **Key Responsibilities:** - Lead and mentor a team of automation and manual QA engineers. - Define, design, and implement scalable test automation frameworks for web, API, and mobile applications. - Establish and maintain automation best practices, coding standards, and review processes. - Develop and maintain automated regression suites using Playwright. - Integrate automated tests into CI/CD pipelines (Jenkins, GitHub Actions, Azure DevOps). - Collaborate with developers, product owners, and DevOps teams to ensure seamless testing across environments. - Drive test strategy, planning, and prioritization for releases and sprints. - Conduct code reviews, analyze test results, and troubleshoot complex automation issues. - Track and report test coverage, defect trends, and quality metrics. - Stay current with new tools, frameworks, and industry trends to continuously enhance test automation processes. **Required Skills & Qualifications:** - Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, IT, or related field. - 6-10 years of overall QA experience, with 3+ years in automation leadership or lead roles. - Strong hands-on experience with Playwright, Selenium, or Cypress for web automation. - Proficient in JavaScript/TypeScript, or Java/Python for test scripting. - Experience in API testing and automation (Playwright API, Postman, RestAssured). - Deep understanding of CI/CD tools (Jenkins, GitHub Actions, Azure DevOps). - Solid understanding of Agile/Scrum methodologies and sprint-based QA processes. - Experience working with test management tools like JIRA, Zephyr, TestRail. - Strong analytical, debugging, and problem-solving skills. - Excellent communication and leadership skills. **Nice-to-Have Skills:** - Exposure to BDD frameworks (Cucumber, Gherkin). - Knowledge of Docker / Kubernetes for test environment setup. - Familiarity with performance testing tools (JMeter, k6). - Experience with cloud testing platforms (BrowserStack, Sauce Labs). - Background in security or accessibility testing is a plus.,