Role Overview:

We are looking for a Senior QA Automation Engineer with a minimum of 7 years of software testing experience, including strong hands-on automation across web (Playwright) and mobile (Appium) platforms. The ideal candidate owns automation frameworks end to end, brings a strong testing-fundamentals background, and can independently drive quality strategy across product releases while mentoring the wider QA team.

Key Responsibilities:

- Understand project requirements and develop detailed test plans, test cases, test scenarios, and the corresponding automation strategy.

- Participate in requirement analysis, design discussions, and review meetings to provide input on testability, risk, and automation feasibility.

- Decide what belongs in automation vs. manual/exploratory testing and define the regression scope for each release.

Automation Framework Ownership:

- Design, build, and maintain scalable automation frameworks using Playwright (TypeScript/JavaScript) for web and Appium for Android/iOS.

- Establish and enforce framework conventions - page/domain helpers, fixtures, test data builders, reusable utilities - so the suite stays maintainable as it grows.

- Integrate automated suites into CI/CD pipelines (Jenkins / Bitbucket Pipelines / GitHub Actions) with scheduled runs, parallel execution, and actionable reporting.

- Own suite health: investigate and eliminate flaky tests, reduce execution time, and keep pass-rate signal trustworthy.

- Execute and maintain runs on real devices and cross-browser grids (e.g. BrowserStack / Sauce Labs / device farms).

Test Execution:

- Perform functional, integration, system, regression, and API testing on web and mobile applications.

- Execute both manual and automated test cases; convert high-value repeatable manual cases into automated coverage.

- Validate backend behaviour through API testing (REST) and SQL database checks.

Defect Management:

- Work closely with developers to reproduce, analyze, and resolve issues; drive them to closure.

- Distinguish genuine product defects from test/environment issues before raising them - never mask a real bug by adjusting a test.

- Maintain clear, reproducible documentation of bugs, test results, and root-cause findings.

Reporting & Communication:

- Prepare test reports summarizing test activities, automation coverage, outcomes, and quality metrics.

- Communicate test progress, release readiness, risks, and results to stakeholders and leadership.

- Publish periodic quality dashboards (coverage, defect trends, automation pass rate, execution time).

Collaboration & Mentoring:

- Collaborate with cross-functional teams including developers, product managers, and business analysts to ensure software quality.

- Review automation code written by other QA engineers and enforce coding and design standards.

- Mentor junior and mid-level QA engineers on automation practices, debugging techniques, and testing fundamentals.

Required Skills:

Automation:

- 4+ years of hands-on automation experience, with strong command of Playwright for web UI automation.

- Hands-on experience with Appium for native/hybrid mobile app automation on Android and iOS.

- Proficiency in TypeScript / JavaScript (or strong equivalent OOP language experience with willingness to work in TypeScript).

- Has built an automation framework from the ground up, not only added scripts to one that already existed.

- Experience with API test automation and response/schema validation.

- Working knowledge of Git and branching workflows; comfortable raising and reviewing pull requests.

Testing Techniques:

- Expert in test case design, test execution, and defect reporting.

- Strong understanding of the software development life cycle (SDLC) and software testing life cycle (STLC).

- Solid grasp of test design techniques - boundary value analysis, equivalence partitioning, decision tables, risk-based testing.

Tools & Technologies:

- Bug tracking tools such as JIRA, Bugzilla, or similar.

- Test management tools such as TestRail, Zephyr, BrowserStack Test Management, or similar.

- CI/CD tooling - Jenkins, Bitbucket Pipelines, GitHub Actions, or similar.

- Cloud device/browser labs such as BrowserStack or Sauce Labs.

Domain Knowledge:

- Proven experience testing both web and mobile applications.

- Good working knowledge of SQL for database testing and data validation.

- Familiarity with performance or security testing basics is an added advantage.

Good to Have:

- Experience introducing contract testing, service virtualisation, or API mocking to de-risk dependent services.

- Performance testing experience with JMeter, k6, or Gatling, and the ability to interpret results.

- Security testing basics - OWASP Top 10 awareness, and use of tools such as OWASP ZAP or Burp Suite.

- Experience with visual regression and accessibility automation (Percy, axe-core, Lighthouse).

- Docker/Kubernetes familiarity for containerised test execution.

- Experience defining and tracking quality KPIs - escaped-defect rate, automation ROI, mean time to triage.

- Test data management strategy at scale - seeding, masking, and environment isolation.

- Experience defining a shift-left or in-sprint automation model and getting a team to adopt it.

- Exposure to observability tooling (Grafana, Datadog, Sentry) for correlating test failures with system behaviour.

- Experience applying AI-assisted tooling to test generation, failure triage, or code review, with judgement about where it should not be trusted.

Soft Skills:

- Excellent analytical and problem-solving skills; able to root-cause an issue rather than report only the symptom.

- Strong attention to detail and commitment to delivering high-quality results.

- Good communication and interpersonal skills; able to present quality status confidently to stakeholders.

- Ownership mindset - takes responsibility for release quality end to end.

Collaboration and communication:

- Proactive monitoring and collaboration with team members and internal departments are necessary to guarantee seamless operations at the Centre.

How the role interacts with other teams or individuals:

- Ensure effective communication and coordination between different cross functional teams to align the technology function with overall business goals.