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Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for Automation QA Engineer

💰 $80,000 - $140,000

Quality AssuranceSoftware EngineeringTest AutomationDevOpsAgile

🎯 Role Definition

We are seeking an experienced Automation QA Engineer to design, build, and maintain automated test frameworks and test suites that ensure high-quality releases across web, API, and mobile platforms. The ideal candidate will partner closely with engineering, product, and operations teams to embed testing into CI/CD pipelines, reduce manual testing effort, and provide fast, reliable feedback on application quality. This role demands expertise in test automation tooling (e.g., Selenium, Cypress, Playwright, Appium), API testing (REST, GraphQL), performance and security testing practices, and a strong engineering mindset toward scalable and maintainable test architecture.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

  • Manual QA Engineer transitioning to automation or a Junior Automation Engineer with 0–2 years of hands-on automation scripting.
  • Software Engineer or SDET (Software Development Engineer in Test) moving into a QA-focused automation role.
  • QA Analyst or Test Engineer with experience in test case design and basic scripting.

Advancement To:

  • Senior Automation QA Engineer / Senior SDET
  • QA Tech Lead or Test Architect responsible for overall testing strategy and frameworks
  • Engineering Manager for QA or Head of Quality Engineering

Lateral Moves:

  • DevOps Engineer focusing on continuous testing and pipeline automation
  • Platform or Infrastructure Engineer specializing in test environments, containers, and test data management
  • Product Engineering roles with a quality ownership emphasis

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

  • Design, implement, and maintain robust, reusable, and scalable automated test frameworks for web, API, and mobile applications using tools such as Selenium WebDriver, Playwright, Cypress, Appium, or equivalent frameworks to accelerate delivery and reduce regression risk.
  • Author, review, and execute automated end-to-end test suites and component-level tests alongside developers, ensuring high test coverage and alignment with requirements and acceptance criteria.
  • Build and maintain API test automation leveraging tools and libraries such as REST-assured, Postman/Newman, HTTP client libraries, GraphQL test scripts, and contract testing frameworks to validate backend services, integrations, and third-party dependencies.
  • Integrate automated tests directly into CI/CD pipelines (Jenkins, GitLab CI, Azure DevOps, CircleCI, AWS CodeBuild) to enable continuous testing, fast feedback, and release gating during pull requests and deployments.
  • Create and maintain automated smoke and regression suites that run reliably on each build, optimizing execution time, flakiness mitigation, and test parallelization using Docker, Selenium Grid, or cloud test grids (BrowserStack, Sauce Labs).
  • Collaborate with product owners and software engineers to define acceptance criteria and translate business requirements into testable scenarios; contribute to requirement refinement and risk-based test planning.
  • Drive test strategy for new features, including test approach, environment needs, test data design, mocks and stubs, and performance/security test considerations to ensure production-readiness.
  • Implement data-driven, behavior-driven (BDD) or keyword-driven testing approaches as appropriate using frameworks such as Cucumber, JUnit, TestNG, pytest, Robot Framework or similar to improve readability and maintainability of automation assets.
  • Design and implement robust test data management strategies, fixture setup, and teardown processes to ensure repeatable test execution in ephemeral and shared environments.
  • Triage, reproduce, and report defects with clear reproduction steps, logs, and automation traces; collaborate with engineering teams to diagnose root causes and validate fixes in automated tests.
  • Monitor and reduce flaky tests by adding stabilization logic, retry strategies, better assertions, timeouts, environmental isolation, and collaboration on code changes that cause instability.
  • Measure and report QA metrics (test coverage, pass/fail rates, flakiness, test execution time, automated ROI) and use these insights to continuously improve automation coverage and test effectiveness.
  • Participate actively in Agile ceremonies (sprint planning, backlog grooming, retrospectives), provide testing estimates, and help prioritize testing work to align QA efforts with sprint and release goals.
  • Review and enforce quality gates in pull requests by reviewing test code, providing feedback on test design and automation best practices, and conducting code reviews for automation scripts and test-related infrastructure.
  • Mentor and coach other QA engineers and cross-functional team members in test automation practices, coding standards, and test-driven development (TDD) and continuous testing principles.
  • Architect and evolve the test automation ecosystem, selecting tools, libraries, patterns, and helper utilities that improve developer experience and reduce maintenance overhead.
  • Implement and run non-functional testing: performance testing (JMeter, Gatling), load testing, stress testing and basic security scanning to identify regressions and capacity issues before production.
  • Ensure testability by collaborating with developers to build test hooks, feature flags, and observability (logs, metrics, traces) that help automation validate internal application state and behavior.
  • Create and maintain documentation for automation frameworks, test plans, runbooks, release test matrices, and onboarding guides to reduce knowledge silos and accelerate new hire productivity.
  • Automate end-to-end deployment validations and release verification procedures, including smoke checks, database migrations validation, and environment health checks in pre-prod and production canaries.
  • Drive continuous improvement initiatives for QA processes, such as reducing manual exploratory testing time, increasing automation run cadence, and improving defect prevention approaches.
  • Lead cross-functional exploratory testing sessions to uncover edge-case behaviors not covered by automated suites and to improve user-facing quality from multiple stakeholder perspectives.
  • Collaborate with security, compliance, and accessibility teams to ensure the product meets regulatory and accessibility standards (WCAG, GDPR-related test coverage), adding automated checks where feasible.

Secondary Functions

  • Support ad-hoc data requests and exploratory data analysis.
  • Contribute to the organization's data strategy and roadmap.
  • Collaborate with business units to translate data needs into engineering requirements.
  • Participate in sprint planning and agile ceremonies within the data engineering team.
  • Assist in environment provisioning and test environment debugging with DevOps and platform teams to reduce environment-related test failures.
  • Participate in release retrospectives and postmortems to identify systemic quality issues and corrective actions.
  • Assist product support teams in triaging production incidents by reproducing issues and providing test coverage to prevent recurrence.
  • Stay current with industry trends in test automation, open-source tooling, and quality engineering practices and share learnings with the broader engineering org.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

  • Strong programming/scripting skills in one or more languages commonly used for test automation (Java, Python, JavaScript/TypeScript, C#, or Ruby) and the ability to write maintainable, modular automation code.
  • Hands-on experience with web UI automation frameworks and tools such as Selenium WebDriver, Cypress, Playwright, or equivalent cross-browser automation tooling.
  • Proficiency in API testing and automation using REST-assured, Postman/Newman, HTTP client libraries, or GraphQL testing approaches.
  • Familiarity with mobile automation using Appium, Espresso, XCUITest, or equivalent tools for iOS and Android test automation.
  • Experience integrating automated tests into CI/CD pipelines (Jenkins, GitLab CI, Azure DevOps, CircleCI) and automating test execution in build and deployment workflows.
  • Knowledge of test frameworks and test runners (JUnit, TestNG, pytest, Mocha/Jest) and practices for assertions, fixtures, parameterization, and test isolation.
  • Practical understanding of test design techniques: BDD (Cucumber), TDD, data-driven testing, page object model (POM), and component-level testing patterns.
  • Experience with containerization and orchestration (Docker, Kubernetes) to package and run tests in isolated environments and to manage test infrastructure.
  • Familiarity with performance and load testing tools such as JMeter, Gatling, k6 or equivalent, and the ability to design baseline performance tests.
  • Experience with test reporting, logging and observability tools, and test result dashboards (Allure, TestNG reports, TeamCity/GitLab reports, Grafana) to communicate QA metrics.
  • Experience with version control (Git) and branching strategies, including writing CI scripts, build artifacts management, and release gating with automated checks.
  • Knowledge of mocking, stubbing, service virtualization, and contract testing to isolate components and enable reliable automation in the face of external dependencies.
  • Understanding of security testing fundamentals and automated security scanning tools (OWASP ZAP, Snyk, dependency scanners) for early vulnerability detection.
  • Experience working with cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, GCP) for test environment provisioning, test data storage, and running scalable test jobs.
  • Familiarity with accessibility testing tools (axe-core, Lighthouse) to include automated checks for accessibility regressions.

Soft Skills

  • Excellent communication skills to articulate test findings, reproduce steps clearly, and influence engineering and product decisions.
  • Strong analytical and problem-solving ability to triage flaky tests, debug complex integrations, and determine root causes across stack layers.
  • Detail-oriented mindset and a commitment to delivering high-quality software with meticulous test design and verification.
  • Collaborative team player who partners effectively with developers, product managers, DevOps, and support teams in an Agile environment.
  • Proactive ownership attitude: able to independently drive automation initiatives from concept through production adoption.
  • Time management and prioritization skills to balance exploratory testing, automation backlog, and urgent production issues.
  • Mentoring and leadership capability to elevate team testing maturity through coaching, documentation, and code reviews.
  • Adaptability to rapidly changing priorities, new technologies, and evolving product requirements.
  • Customer-focused mindset to understand end-user scenarios and prioritize tests that prevent customer-impacting regressions.
  • Ability to synthesize complex technical information into clear, actionable reports and test documentation for stakeholders.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

  • Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Information Systems, or related technical field, or equivalent practical experience.

Preferred Education:

  • Master's degree in a relevant technical discipline or advanced certification in software testing/quality (e.g., ISTQB Advanced, Certified SDET, or equivalent).
  • Professional certifications in cloud platforms (AWS, Azure) or DevOps toolchains are a plus.

Relevant Fields of Study:

  • Computer Science
  • Software Engineering
  • Information Technology
  • Applied Mathematics / Statistics
  • Systems Engineering

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range:

  • 3–8 years of combined software testing and automation experience; typical mid-level Automation QA Engineers have 3–5 years, while senior engineers have 5+ years.

Preferred:

  • 5+ years of practical experience building and operating automated test frameworks across UI, API, and mobile channels.
  • Proven track record integrating automation into CI/CD pipelines and reducing manual regression effort.
  • Experience with Agile/Scrum teams, participating in full software delivery lifecycle, and contributing to release quality and velocity improvements.
  • Demonstrated ability to lead automation initiatives, set testing strategy, and mentor junior engineers.
  • Experience with performance, security, accessibility, and reliability testing is highly desirable.
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