Lead Engineer - Locator Technologies

Purpose of the role:

We are seeking a Lead Engineer to own and evolve the architecture of Provar’s locator platform that underpins our intelligent, scalable, and user-friendly test automation solutions. This is a hands-on individual contributor role that combines deep engineering expertise with architectural oversight. You will play a pivotal role in advancing our proprietary locator technologies, ProvarX and NitroX, to meet the evolving demands of modern enterprise web platforms, including Salesforce and beyond.

You will join a high-impact team responsible for solving the hardest problems in no-code/low-code UI test automation, including deep support for Web Components, proprietary frameworks, locator self-healing, AI integration, and much more! Your work will directly impact Provar’s product quality and user experience, whilst improving test reliability for our customers’ complex enterprise applications.

Day-to-day responsibilities & accountabilities:

You’ll be responsible for:

• Architecting elegant, performant, and scalable solutions that support automated testing across a wide range of modern web UI technologies, including standard web elements, web components, complex component hierarchies, and proprietary frameworks.
• Designing and implementing enhancements to our ProvarX locator engine and leading the architecture of our NitroX web component testing framework.
• Delivering high-quality code as a senior engineer while maintaining architectural integrity, system performance, and testability.
• Embedding AI capabilities into our locator technologies to support self-healing, intelligent locator generation, and assistive scripting workflows.
• Ensuring architectural consistency and long-term maintainability of locator strategies that are resilient to breaking changes introduced by SaaS vendors, such as during Salesforce’s thrice-yearly platform updates.
• Collaborating closely with product management, UX, and QA teams to define features, refine requirements, and ensure our solutions enable a best-in-class user experience for both technical and non-technical users.
• Mentoring other engineers and contributing to engineering best practices, architectural standards, and continuous improvement initiatives across the organization.

Key skills:

You’ll have:

• A solid academic foundation to degree level or higher.
• 10+ years of software engineering experience.
• Proficiency in Java and JavaScript, including modern frameworks.
• Deep hands-on engineering experience building test automation tooling, particularly for web UI testing with frameworks such as Selenium WebDriver.
• Strong expertise in modern JavaScript and browser-based technologies, with a deep understanding of the Shadow DOM, Web Components, and the DOM traversal challenges they present.
• Proven ability to design and implement robust locator strategies, including parameterised, reusable, and runtime-generated locators.
• Experience in architecting self-healing or AI-assisted automation solutions, and integrating ML models or intelligent heuristics into software tooling.
• Demonstrated ability to balance individual contributor responsibilities with architectural leadership in a product-driven engineering environment.
• Working knowledge of component packaging, distribution strategies, and test accelerators in test automation ecosystems.

You’ll be:

• A hands-on technologist who thrives in solving difficult engineering problems through elegant and scalable solutions.
• A strategic thinker who anticipates platform-level challenges and incorporates architectural foresight into system design.
• A champion of performance, maintainability, and user experience, continuously seeking to optimise locator execution and script authoring.
• A self-starter who takes initiative, operates with autonomy, and drives complex projects from concept to production.
• A mentor and influencer, able to elevate technical excellence across the team and promote modern engineering practices.
• An advocate of innovation, quality, and inclusion, who fosters an environment of curiosity and continuous learning..

It may be advantageous to also have these skills:

• Experience with AI/ML platforms and integrating intelligent systems into developer tools.
• Familiarity with other test automation platforms and understanding of their locator models.
• Exposure to enterprise CI/CD pipelines and how test frameworks integrate into automated delivery workflows.
• Prior experience with SaaS or B2B automation tools for complex enterprise applications.
• Familiarity with testing Salesforce.