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Lead QA Automation Engineer (Playwright)

Location: 100 Corporate Center Dr, Warren, NJ 07059, United States (3 Day Onsite)

Job Description: 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.

Position Details

• Job Title: Lead QA Automation Engineer (Playwright)
• Experience: 8+ 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 Google Cloud Platform 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.