Role: Lead QA Automation Engineer (Playwright)

Location: Warren, NJ 07059

Domain: Insurance

Work Arrangement: Hybrid (3 days in a Week) on C2C

Role Overview

We are looking for an experienced Lead QA Automation Engineer with strong hands-on expertise in Playwright to lead the quality engineering practice across our web applications and services. The ideal candidate has 8+ years of progressive QA experience — including automation framework design, test strategy, CI/CD-integrated testing, and team leadership. You will define the quality roadmap, mentor a team of QA engineers, and drive a shift-left, automation-first culture across the engineering organization.

Key Responsibilities

Test Strategy & Leadership

Define and own the end-to-end test strategy across functional, regression, integration, API, performance, and accessibility testing.

Establish quality gates, KPIs, and SLAs for releases; report quality metrics to engineering and product leadership.

Drive a shift-left quality culture: in-sprint automation, risk-based testing, and early defect prevention.

Evaluate and select tools, frameworks, and processes that improve test efficiency and coverage.

Automation Framework & Engineering

Architect, build, and maintain a scalable, reusable Playwright-based test automation framework (TypeScript/JavaScript).

Design Page Object Model (POM) / Screenplay / fixture-based patterns for maintainability and reuse.

Implement parallel, cross-browser, and cross-device test execution (Chromium, Firefox, WebKit, mobile emulation).

Build API test automation using Playwright API testing, REST Assured, Supertest, or Postman/Newman.

Develop and maintain data-driven, BDD (Cucumber/Gherkin), and tag-based test execution strategies.

Implement visual regression, accessibility, and contract testing where appropriate.

CI/CD & DevOps Integration

Integrate automated tests into CI/CD pipelines using GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Jenkins, Azure DevOps, or CircleCI.

Configure test environments, containerized test execution (Docker), and cloud test grids (BrowserStack, Sauce Labs, LambdaTest).

Implement intelligent retries, flaky test detection, test sharding, and trace/video/screenshot capture for diagnostics.

Drive reporting and observability with Allure, Playwright HTML reporter, ReportPortal, or custom dashboards.

Team Leadership & Mentorship

Lead, mentor, and grow a team of QA and SDET engineers; conduct interviews and hire top quality engineering talent.

Perform code reviews of automation scripts, enforce standards, and continuously improve quality of test code.

Coach manual testers on transitioning to automation and engineering best practices.

Champion Agile/Scrum ceremonies — sprint planning, refinement, retros — from the QA perspective.