The Lead QA Automation is the company's automation engineering authority, explicitly mandated to lead the bank's transformation from a predominantly manual testing organization to an automation-first, AI-augmented quality engineering practice. This role necessitates the architecting, building, and embedding of frameworks, toolchains, and practices that will facilitate this transition. The Lead QA Automation will report to the Head of QA and will be responsible for framework design, CI/CD pipeline integration, AI-assisted testing adoption, intelligent test data management, and delivering measurable automation coverage growth across the company's digital and banking platforms.
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What You Will Do
- Lead the company's QA automation transformation programme by establishing the automation vision, multi-quarter roadmap, and coverage targets, aiming for 60–70% test automation coverage across regression, integration, and API test suites within an 18-month horizon.
- Architect and build the company's enterprise test automation framework estate, including UI automation (Playwright/Selenium/Appium for web and mobile), API automation (RestAssured/Karate/Postman/Newman), and data validation test harnesses.
- Integrate automation frameworks into the company's CI/CD pipelines, ensuring automated regression suites execute with clear pass/fail gates and test result dashboards.
- Drive AI-assisted testing adoption across the QA function with implementations for LLM-powered test case generation, self-healing test selectors, and visual regression testing.
- Establish intelligent test data management as an engineering discipline—designing frameworks for synthetic test data generation and on-demand test data provisioning APIs.
- Own API and service-layer automation, ensuring contract tests and integration tests are in place for all microservices and endpoints.
- Govern automation coverage metrics and produce automation health dashboards to report progress against the automation targets.
- Architect containerised and distributed test execution environments using Docker, Kubernetes, and cloud-based device testing platforms.
- Lead and develop the automation engineering team, conducting framework design reviews and knowledge-sharing sessions.
- Evaluate and select automation tooling, ensuring integration into the developer portal.
- Partner with the Head of QA on extending automation coverage into performance test scripting, chaos engineering experiments, and security scanning integration.
Requirements
- 10+ years in test automation engineering with at least 3 years as a Lead or Principal Automation Engineer in an agile delivery environment, preferably within a bank.
- Expert proficiency in at least two automation frameworks across UI and API layers, with strong command of Java, Python, or JavaScript/TypeScript.
- Proven experience building test automation frameworks from a low-coverage baseline with measurable growth.
- Hands-on CI/CD integration experience with tools like GitHub Actions or Azure DevOps.
- Demonstrable experience with AI-assisted testing tools and the ability to evaluate and scale these capabilities.
- Experience designing test data management solutions including synthetic data generation and PII masking.
- Familiarity with containerised test execution and cloud testing platforms.
- Bachelor's degree in computer science, Software Engineering, or a related field. ISTQB Test Automation Engineer certification is required.
