Lead Automation Engineer

Lead Automation Engineer

Location: Porto Matosinhos – 2 days in office | Salary: €65,000 - €75,000

Role Overview: Embedded within a mission team, you’ll champion quality and ownership across payments, banking, onboarding, and other domains, leveraging automation tooling to maximize test coverage and accelerate delivery.

Responsibilities

Mission Team Quality Ownership & Strategy

• Define and own the comprehensive testing strategy for your domain (e.g., payments, banking, onboarding), ensuring end‑to‑end quality and compliance in partnership with the QA Team Lead.
• Act as the primary contributor for automation; design, develop, and maintain robust automated tests (API, UI, Mobile).
• Champion a "Shift‑Left" mindset, working with Product Owners and Developers from the refinement stage to ensure quality is engineered in from the start.
• Directly manage the mission team’s automation targets and use data‑driven insights (MTTD/MTTR, defect escape rates) to predict high‑risk areas.

Technical Leadership & Tooling Adoption

• Serve as the mission team's expert on central automation frameworks, driving consistent adoption of CI/CD processes and quality gates.
• Identify team‑specific gaps and collaborate with the central Tooling Team to develop custom helpers or data generators that enhance the core framework.
• Ensure automated test suites are fully integrated into CI/CD pipelines to enable rapid, reliable deployment and a "fail fast" mechanism.
• Coordinate complex technical testing, including microservices, security (OWASP ZAP), and performance testing.

Collaboration, Coaching & AI Innovation

• Coach and upskill developers and junior QA engineers on automation best practices and test design patterns.
• Champion the use of AI tools (Claude, GitHub Copilot) for complex tasks like architecture exploration, incident investigation, and test generation.
• Leverage component testing, service virtualization, and contract testing to reduce dependencies and enable independent team testing.
• Define test data strategies and environment requirements to support both automated and exploratory testing.

Qualifications

• 5+ years in QA Automation/SDET roles with proven success leading quality within an Agile team.
• Strong proficiency in modern languages essential for automation, specifically C# or JavaScript/TypeScript.
• Experience testing complex financial systems (card issuing, transaction processing, or credit risk).
• Hands‑on experience with UI frameworks (Playwright, Cypress) and API testing frameworks (REST Assured, other API testing frameworks).
• Familiarity with Azure, Git, and integrating automated testing into deployment workflows.
• Ability to influence without authority, encouraging developers and Product Owners to prioritise automation and quality.

Benefits

• Private healthcare through AdvanceCare.
• Anniversary rewards (€280, €570, €860) and a 4‑week fully paid sabbatical.
• Paid car parking.
• 36 days holiday, including public holidays with carryover when falling on a weekend.
• Annual learning and wellbeing budget.
• Six free therapy sessions per year.
• Free drinks and snacks in the office.