Lead Software Tester (Automation)

Key Responsibilities:

Strategy & Governance

. Define and evolve the testing strategy (shiftleft, riskbased testing, BDD/TDD, contract testing) across squads and products.

. Establish common standards and templates (test strategy, plan, RTM, exit criteria) aligned to recognized practices (e.g., ISTQB foundations, ISO/IEC 29119 test documentation, OWASP Testing Guide).

. Create and run quality governance (readiness/exit gates, defect SLAs, change failure rate tracking) and own QA OKRs for the division.

. Maintain a test architecture roadmap (frameworks, environments, data, observability) and drive tool consolidation.

Test Engineering & Automation

. Own endtoend automation strategy: UI, API, contract, component, and smoke/regression suites integrated into CI/CD.

. Ensure maintainable frameworks, coding standards, and code reviews champion modular page/object models, data builders, and parallelization.

. Ability to define and achieve comprehensive test coverage across functional, non-functional, and automation layers to ensure quality and risk mitigation

. Plan and execute performance, scalability, resilience, and security testing collaborate with engineering on tuning and hardening.

. Define SLO aligned test goals (latency, throughput, error rate) and bake checks into pipelines.

Stakeholder Management & Communication

. Partner with Product, Architecture, Cybersecurity, and Compliance to balance risk, speed, and regulatory requirements.

. Provide clear dashboards and release readiness reports communicate trade offs and recommendations to leadership.

. Lead and mentor a multi disciplinary squad (automation, functional, performance, security) serving multiple applications manage capacity, prioritization, and cross team engagement.

. Stand up shared services for regression, performance & security testing, test data management, and environment orchestration.

. Coach squads on story quality (acceptance criteria, testability, Definition of Ready/Done) and facilitate test planning in sprint cadences.

Continuous Improvement

. Lead retrospectives and incident reviews (escaped defects, production issues) to improve prevention.

. Drive skills development (automation, performance, security) and keep the team current with tooling and methods.

Requirements:

1. 9+ years in QA/testing, 3+ years leading centralized or cross product testing teams.

2. Strong proficiency in programming languages such as JavaScript/TypeScript or Python.

3. Strong SQL skills with hands-on experience in MySQL and PostgreSQL for test data preparation, backend verification, and database-level testing.

4. Hands on expertise with Selenium/Cypress/Playwright and API testing (Postman/REST Assured), plus CI/CD integration.

5. Strong grasp of Agile/Scrum, DevOps, and shift left practices (BDD/TDD, contract testing).

6. Solid knowledge of performance and security testing concepts and tools (JMeter/k6, OWASP ZAP).

7. Familiarity with version control systems (e.g., Git) and continuous integration tools (e.g., Jenkins).

8. Experience with cloud platforms (preferably AWS) and container orchestration (Kubernetes) for test environment management.

9. Solid understanding of software testing principles, methodologies, and best practices.

10. Excellent problem-solving skills and attention to detail.

11. Effective communication skills with the ability to collaborate and coordinate with cross-functional teams.

12. Self-motivated with a passion for continuous learning and improvement.

13. Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field.