Lead QA Automation Engineer

Essential Functions

• Quality Strategy & Technical Leadership
• Own MOTER’s end-to-end quality strategy across web, mobile, and backend services, including test plans, coverage targets, environments, and exit criteria.
• Lead technical design discussions and RFCs on testability, automation architecture, and release strategy, making pragmatic trade-offs between speed, maintainability, and long-term product quality.
• Guide framework and tooling decisions across the test automation stack, including upgrades, shared test libraries, runtime performance, and engineering experience for all contributors who write tests.
• Contribute meaningfully to the automation codebase as a hands-on technical leader.
• AI-First Automation Toolchain Design and build MOTER’s AI-first automation toolchain — pipelines, prompts, MCP servers, custom subagents, and harnesses that enable Claude Code, Codex, and other AI coding agents to generate, refactor, and maintain tests reliably.
• Evaluate, choose, and integrate AI-assisted QA tooling including model-based test generation, self-healing selectors, AI-driven visual diff, and intelligent flake detection.
• Define guardrails for AI-generated test code: review processes, quality gates, security boundaries, and metrics that confirm AI-generated tests are improving — not degrading — overall quality.
• Web & Mobile Test Automation Design, build, and maintain MOTER’s web UI automation suite using Playwright, Cypress, and/or Selenium, with a clear perspective on which tool is most effective in a given context.
• Own mobile test automation on Android using Appium and Espresso, including device strategy across real devices and cloud farms such as BrowserStack, Sauce Labs, or Firebase Test Lab.
• Build and harden API and contract tests (REST and GraphQL) for our backend and establish consistent standards for visual quality and release confidence.
• QA Infrastructure, Performance & Observability
• Build the QA infrastructure other engineers depend on: test frameworks, fixtures, environment management, test data factories, reporting, and dashboards.
• Lead performance and load testing efforts using k6, JMeter, or Locust, and define performance budgets and regression gates the team can reliably maintain.
• Improve test observability by partnering with backend and platform engineers on logging, error tracking, tracing, and quality analytics that surface real signal — escape rates, flake rates, coverage, MTTR.
• Aggressively reduce flakiness — instrument, measure, and fix the long tail of unreliable tests so that a red build always indicates a real problem.
• Platform & Release Partnership
• Partner with backend and platform teams on contract testing, endpoint design, authentication flows, and developer ergonomics to ensure testability is built into APIs from day one.
• Work effectively with AWS-hosted and serverless environments with a solid understanding of operational, security, and cost trade-offs for ephemeral test infrastructure.
• Integrate automated tests into CI/CD (GitHub Actions, Jenkins, or similar) with fast feedback, parallelization, sharding, intelligent retries, artifact management, and clear failure triage.
• Contribute to infrastructure and deployment discussions where quality requirements are relevant, without needing to be the sole owner of the cloud platform.
• AI-Assisted Engineering
• Use AI-assisted development tools (Claude Code, Codex) effectively in day-to-day test authoring and help the team adopt practical patterns that improve velocity and reliability.
• Contribute to team conventions for safe AI-assisted test development, including review expectations, evaluation standards, and appropriate guardrails for AI-generated test code.
• Identify opportunities where AI can improve test coverage velocity, debug workflows, and increase engineering leverage without unnecessary process overhead.
• Mentoring & Coaching QA Engineers
• Lead, mentor, and coach QA engineers through technical guidance, code reviews on test code, design reviews, and day-to-day collaboration.
• Help engineers develop sharper judgment around test scope, automation strategy, and when to leverage AI tools versus when to intervene manually.
• Unblock team progress through pairing, debugging, cross-functional collaboration, and clear technical communication.
• Partner with engineering leadership and recruiting on interview design, candidate evaluation, and scaling the QA function thoughtfully.

Qualifications

• Perform other related duties as assigned.
• 7+ years of professional software quality and test automation experience, with at least 2-3 years in a Lead or Staff-level role.
• Deep expertise in web UI automation with Playwright, Cypress, or Selenium — able to architect a suite from scratch and familiar with the failure modes of each framework.
• Strong mobile automation background with Appium and either XCUITest (iOS) or Espresso (Android); experience with both is a plus.
• Hands-on daily use of AI coding tools (Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, or similar) with a well-formed perspective on where they excel, where they fail, and how to make them reliable for production work.
• Solid programming skills in at least one of TypeScript, JavaScript, or Python, with the ability to read the language of the platform under test (Swift/Kotlin/Java).
• Demonstrated track record of building QA infrastructure — frameworks, harnesses, internal tools — that other engineers adopt and use.
• Demonstrated experience improving product quality through automation architecture, code review of test code, and engineering standards.
• Experience building or evolving shared test libraries, page-object frameworks, or other reusable QA tooling in production.
• Solid understanding of test and product observability, including error tracking, flake analytics, logging, and production debugging workflows.
• Ability to work effectively across the frontend, backend, and mobile boundary, including API design, integration patterns, and authentication flows.
• Hands-on experience designing CI/CD pipelines for test execution — parallelization, sharding, artifact management, retry policy, and reporting.
• Familiarity with infrastructure as code (Terraform or similar) for managing ephemeral test environments and reviewing infrastructure changes safely.
• Demonstrated experience mentoring and coaching QA or SDET engineers and establishing testing best practices that take a hold beyond initial rollout.
• Experience with API testing (REST and/or GraphQL), HTTP, async systems, and debugging across the stack.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills.
• High work ethic, self-motivation, and initiative.
• Sound judgment, high integrity, and the ability to work effectively both independently and as part of a larger team.
• Legal authorization to work in the U.S. without sponsorship.