Job Title: Lead QA Automation Engineer (Playwright)

·        Experience: 10+ years (with 2+ years in a lead/senior role)

·        Employment Type: Full-time

·        Department: Quality Engineering / Engineering

·        Reports To: QA Manager / Director of Engineering

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.

Collaboration & Delivery

·        Partner with developers, product managers, designers, and DevOps to ensure quality is owned across the team.

·        Participate in design and architecture reviews to identify testability concerns early.

·        Collaborate with performance, security, and SRE teams for non-functional testing (JMeter, k6, Gatling, OWASP ZAP).

·        Drive root cause analysis (RCA) for production incidents and feed learnings back into test coverage.

Required Skills & Qualifications

Core QA & Automation

·        8+ years of total QA experience with at least 5+ years in test automation.

·        3+ years of hands-on, production-grade experience with Playwright (TypeScript preferred).

·        Proven ability to design and scale automation frameworks from scratch.

·        Strong programming skills in TypeScript/JavaScript; familiarity with Java, Python, or C# is a plus.

·        Deep understanding of QA methodologies — STLC, Agile testing quadrants, risk-based testing, exploratory testing.

Playwright Expertise

·        Expert with Playwright Test Runner, fixtures, projects, parallelization, and worker management.

·        Strong command of auto-waiting, locators, role-based selectors, and resilient test design.

·        Experience with Playwright API testing, network mocking, request interception, and route handling.

·        Hands-on with Playwright tracing, codegen, debugging, and CI integration.

·        Experience with component testing using Playwright Experimental Component Testing or similar.

Testing Types & Tools

·        API testing with Playwright APIRequest, REST Assured, Postman/Newman, or Supertest.

·        BDD frameworks: Cucumber, Playwright-BDD, SpecFlow, or Behave.

·        Performance/load testing exposure: JMeter, k6, Gatling, or Locust.

·        Accessibility testing: axe-core, Playwright accessibility checks, Lighthouse CI.

·        Visual regression: Playwright snapshots, Percy, Applitools, or Chromatic.

·        Mobile testing exposure: Playwright mobile emulation, Appium, or BrowserStack App Live (nice to have).

CI/CD, Cloud & DevOps

·        Hands-on with GitHub Actions, Jenkins, GitLab CI, Azure DevOps, or CircleCI for test pipelines.

·        Experience containerizing tests with Docker; familiarity with Kubernetes is a plus.

·        Familiarity with AWS, Azure, or GCP for test infrastructure and environments.

·        Hands-on with cloud-based test grids: BrowserStack, Sauce Labs, LambdaTest.

Quality Engineering Practices

·        Strong grasp of test pyramid, contract testing (Pact), and shift-left/shift-right testing.

·        Experience with test data management, synthetic data generation, and environment management.

·        Familiarity with feature flagging and progressive delivery (LaunchDarkly, Unleash) for safe rollouts.

·        Solid understanding of SDLC, defect lifecycle, and tools like Jira, Xray, Zephyr, TestRail, or qTest.

Web & API Fundamentals

·        Strong understanding of HTML, CSS, DOM, JavaScript runtime, and browser internals.

·        Solid grasp of HTTP, REST, GraphQL, WebSockets, authentication (OAuth 2.0, JWT, SSO).

·        Comfortable reading and writing SQL; experience validating data in relational and NoSQL databases.

·        Familiarity with microservices, event-driven architectures, and message brokers (Kafka, RabbitMQ).

Leadership & Soft Skills

·        Proven experience leading QA/SDET teams and owning quality for multiple products or modules.

·        Excellent communication, stakeholder management, and reporting skills.

·        Strong analytical, troubleshooting, and root-cause analysis abilities.

·        Ability to balance speed and quality, and to make pragmatic, data-driven trade-offs.

·        Passion for quality, continuous improvement, and engineering excellence.

Nice to Have

·        Experience with security testing (OWASP ZAP, Burp Suite) and basic threat modeling.

·        Exposure to AI-assisted testing tools, self-healing tests, or LLM-based test generation.

·        Contributions to open-source QA/automation projects or a strong technical blog.

·        Experience in regulated domains — Insurance, BFSI, or Healthcare.

·        Relevant certifications: ISTQB Advanced, Certified Agile Tester, AWS/Azure certifications.