Automation Engineer in London

Job Description – Senior Automation Test Engineer / Test Lead

Role Overview

We are looking for an experienced Senior Automation Test Engineer / Test Lead who can take end-to-end ownership of testing and help shape the overall quality and automation strategy. The ideal candidate should be highly hands-on, with strong experience in automation, Playwright, API testing, performance testing and CI/CD, along with the ability to lead and mentor a testing team.

Key Responsibilities

• Take end-to-end ownership of testing activities, from test planning and strategy through execution, automation and reporting.

• Define and shape the overall test strategy, automation approach and quality processes.

• Design and build E2E test automation frameworks from scratch covering both functional and performance testing.

• Develop, maintain and enhance scalable automation solutions using Playwright.

• Drive automation across UI, API and end-to-end testing.

• Design and execute performance, load, stress and scalability testing to validate system performance.

• Integrate functional and performance automated tests into CI/CD pipelines.

• Lead and mentor QA/Test Engineers, providing technical guidance and helping improve automation capability across the team.

• Work closely with developers, Product Owners and other stakeholders to ensure quality throughout the delivery lifecycle.

• Identify testing risks, dependencies and coverage gaps early in the delivery process.

• Drive continuous improvement in testing standards, tools, frameworks and processes.

• Actively participate in Agile ceremonies including sprint planning, refinement, stand-ups, reviews and retrospectives.

Essential Skills & Experience

• Extensive hands-on experience in automation testing.

• Strong experience in designing and building E2E automation frameworks from scratch.

• Extensive hands-on knowledge of Playwright.

• Strong experience in API testing and API automation.

• Good knowledge and hands-on experience in performance testing, including load, stress and scalability testing.

• Experience designing automation frameworks that support both functional and performance testing.

• Strong understanding of CI/CD and integrating automated tests into deployment pipelines.

• Experience taking complete ownership of testing for a project, product or application.

• Previous experience leading, mentoring and providing technical direction to a testing team.

• Ability to define and improve test strategy, automation strategy and regression coverage.

• Good knowledge of Agile methodologies and experience working within Agile delivery teams.

• Excellent communication skills, with the ability to communicate effectively with technical teams, business stakeholders and leadership.

• Strong analytical and problem-solving skills.

Good to Have

• Knowledge of Google Cloud Platform (GCP) concepts.

• Experience testing cloud-based applications, microservices and distributed systems.

• Knowledge of performance-testing tools and performance monitoring/analysis.

• Experience with cloud-based CI/CD and deployment processes.

Candidate Profile

The ideal candidate should be a strong hands-on automation engineer as well as a technical test leader. They should be capable of taking a project from having limited automation to establishing a robust E2E functional and performance testing framework from scratch, while providing leadership and direction to the wider testing team.

Main changes: I’ve elevated performance testing, framework development from scratch, and communication skills into the core requirements. This makes the JD clearer that you need someone who can genuinely own and build the testing capability, not simply execute tests within an existing framework.