Lead QA Automation Engineer (Playwright)

Job Description

Job Description

Client Name Everest Insurance (Please do not post client name anywhere) Position Title Lead QA Automation Engineer (Playwright) Domain EXP (Finance/Insurance Domain) Location 100 corporate center dr, Warren, NJ 07059, United States (3 Day Onsite) Employment Type C2C Rate $70/hr. All inclusive Indent ID SF_OP_202853-4-4 Job ID 176719 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 GCP 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 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.
All candidate submissions should come with valid documents and ID proof.

Submission Matrix:
Name of the candidate Contact# Email ID Location Availability Visa Rate Supplier Name Particular Details LinkedIn profile Link Ptalent Applicant id Job# Profile uploaded against which Indent:RelocationETA for relocation post pandemicEducational qualification (along with Year of passing and university details)Video / In-person interview availability (Yes/No)Currently on ProjectAny CertificationInterviewed with Persistent in past 3 months
Skill Matrix:
Skill Years of experience