Job Title: Lead QA Automation Engineer (Playwright)

Location: Warren, NJ 07059, United States (3 Day Onsite)

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

Domain EXP: (Finance/Insurance Domain)

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.

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.