Lead Test Automation Engineer

About the role

Our client, a well-established national financial services organization, is seeking an experienced Lead Test Automation Engineer to guide a small team of automation engineers and advance automation maturity across complex applications and delivery teams. This is a chance to combine hands-on technical work with real influence over automation strategy, frameworks, and tooling.

The Lead Test Automation Engineer is a hands-on technical leader responsible for guiding a team of 2-3 automation engineers. You’ll lead the design, development, and ongoing improvement of scalable test automation frameworks, environments, and CI/CD integrations. You’ll work with minimal supervision and partner closely with engineering, product, DevOps, architecture, business subject matter experts and QA teams to improve test coverage, reliability, performance and release confidence.

Responsibilities

• Lead and provide technical direction to a team of automation engineers.
• Design, develop, and maintain scalable automated test strategies, frameworks, and scripts supporting API, UI, integration, functional, regression, smoke, performance, and reliability testing.
• Recommend and help standardize automation frameworks, test environments, tools, coding practices, and implementation patterns.
• Drive automation strategy, framework design, solution planning, CI/CD integration, and tooling decisions for major initiatives.
• Remain hands-on with framework development, test implementation, code reviews, debugging, and technical problem-solving.
• Mentor automation engineers, Software Test Engineers, analysts, and interns, and serve as an automation subject matter expert across delivery teams.
• Lead the consistent adoption of automation and quality engineering best practices.
• Own automation framework health, pipeline integration, and execution reliability, and communicate automation risks, gaps, and progress to leadership.
• Define and track meaningful automation metrics, including coverage, execution results, stability, failure trends, and test effectiveness.
• Lead root-cause analysis for complex automation failures, framework issues, and recurring defects, and implement improvements to prevent recurrence.
• Identify and implement improvements that increase automation efficiency, maintainability, scalability, and execution speed.
• Partner with development, QA, DevOps, architecture, product teams, business stakeholders, and third-party vendors to support high-quality delivery.
• Communicate technical recommendations, automation health, delivery risks, and improvement opportunities to technical and