Lead QA Automation Engineer – Quality Engineering
Location: Trivandrum, Kerala
Work Model: Initially office-based; eventually minimum 3 days/week hybrid
Experience: 9–15Years
Industry: Banking / SaaS / Financial Technology
About the Role
We are looking for a Lead QA Automation Engineer / Quality Engineering professional who thinks like a software engineer and is passionate about building quality into enterprise software.
This is not a traditional QA management role. The ideal candidate will be hands-on with automation, framework architecture, API and backend testing, CI/CD, and modern quality engineering practices.
You will play a key role in defining the organization's automation strategy, improving engineering quality, and building scalable solutions for mission-critical applications.
Key Responsibilities
- Define and implement the Automation and Quality Engineering strategy.
- Architect and develop scalable, maintainable automation frameworks.
- Drive automation across API, backend, database, integration, and end-to-end testing.
- Integrate automated testing and quality gates into CI/CD pipelines.
- Establish meaningful quality, risk, and engineering metrics.
- Implement continuous testing practices across the software development lifecycle.
- Partner closely with Engineering, Product, Architecture, and DevOps teams.
- Conduct technical and code reviews for automation solutions.
- Mentor and guide QA Automation and Quality Engineering professionals.
- Drive improvements in performance, resilience, scalability, and reliability testing.
- Identify opportunities for intelligent automation and AI-enabled Quality Engineering.
- Continuously evaluate and adopt modern testing tools, frameworks, and engineering practices.
Required Technical Skills
- 9–12 years of experience in Software Quality Engineering, QA Automation, SDET, or related engineering roles.
- Strong hands-on experience with automation frameworks and programming.
- Experience with one or more:
- Selenium
- Playwright
- Cypress
- Strong experience in API automation and testing.
- Experience with:
- Rest Assured
- Postman
- Strong knowledge of SQL and backend/database validation.
- Hands-on experience integrating automation with:
- Jenkins
- Azure DevOps
- GitHub Actions
- Experience with CI/CD and continuous testing.
- Knowledge of performance and scalability testing.
- Experience with Kafka or event-driven systems.
- Exposure to Microsoft Azure.
- Experience with Kubernetes/containerized environments.
- Strong understanding of software testing methodologies, automation architecture, and quality engineering practices.
Preferred Qualifications
- Experience in Banking, Financial Services, FinTech, or SaaS environments.
- Experience designing automation frameworks from the ground up.
- Strong programming experience in Java, Python, JavaScript, or TypeScript.
- Experience with distributed systems and microservices testing.
- Knowledge of performance testing tools and engineering practices.
- Experience implementing quality gates and automated testing within DevOps pipelines.
- Exposure to AI-driven or intelligent test automation.
