Lead QA Automation Engineer – Release Certification & Continuous Delivery

We are looking for a highly capable Lead QA Automation Engineer who can own release certification for fast-moving products and support a delivery model where the team can confidently qualify up to one release per hour through strong automation, pipeline gating, and rapid test execution. This role is not for a manual tester. This is for a high-speed, automation-first QA leader who can build a release-certification engine around UI, API, integration, and performance checks.The ideal candidate should be able to design and maintain a certification pipeline that automatically validates every release candidate, quickly identifies failures, blocks bad deployments, and gives a clear go/no-go status within minutes. The person should be technically strong, quality obsessed, fast in debugging, and comfortable working with engineering, DevOps, and product teams. Playwright supports cross-browser automation and parallel execution, GitHub Actions supports CI/CD workflows, Newman/Postman CLI supports API collection runs in CI, and k6 is commonly used for automated performance testing in CI-driven workflows.Experience Required

• 6 to 10 years of total QA experience
• At least 4+ years in automation testing
• At least 2+ years in release certification, test pipeline ownership, or QA lead role
• Strong experience in high-frequency releases, CI/CD-driven testing, and production-quality release gating

Role ObjectiveThis role will own the quality certification layer for all releases and ensure that code pushed by development teams is automatically validated through robust test suites and release gates. The goal is to make frequent releases possible without reducing confidence in quality.Key Responsibilities

• Build and own an automation-first release certification framework
• Design a testing model that supports hourly or near-hourly release qualification
• Create fast-running smoke, sanity, API, integration, and critical regression suites
• Certify every release candidate through automated quality gates before production movement
• Work closely with developers and DevOps teams to integrate automated tests into CI/CD pipelines
• Ensure fast pass/fail visibility for each build and release
• Reduce test execution time through parallel execution, smart suite design, tagging, test isolation, and environment readiness
• Identify flaky tests, unstable environments, and false positives, and remove bottlenecks from the certification process
• Perform root-cause analysis for release failures and distinguish between code defect, test defect, data defect, and environment defect
• Define release-readiness criteria, defect severity rules, rollback criteria, and certification signoff mechanisms
• Build dashboards and reports for release health, failure trends, automation coverage, and escaped defects
• Support both pre-release validation and post-deployment smoke verification
• Coordinate with product owners, developers, QA engineers, and DevOps for rapid resolution of blockers
• Mentor QA engineers and push the team toward strong automation maturity

Mandatory Technical Skills

• Strong hands-on experience in test automation architecture
• Strong experience in web UI automation
• Strong experience in API automation
• Strong understanding of CI/CD-based quality gates
• Strong experience in release certification
• Good understanding of distributed systems, environment dependencies, test data management, and service integration testing
• Experience in debugging front-end, backend, database, and deployment-related issues
• Strong understanding of test strategy for high-frequency release environments
• Good scripting/programming skills in JavaScript / TypeScript or Java / Python
• Good knowledge of Git, branching strategy, release flow, and defect lifecycle
• Strong analytical thinking, ownership mindset, and decision-making capability

Mandatory Tools to Be Mentioned in the JDThe candidate should have strong hands-on experience in the following tool stack:

• Playwright as the primary UI automation framework for fast, parallel, cross-browser release certification. Playwright Test includes a built-in runner, assertions, isolation, and parallelization, and supports Chromium, Firefox, and WebKit in local and CI environments.
• Postman CLI / Newman for API smoke and regression certification in pipelines. Newman is Postman’s command-line runner for collections and is designed to run in CI/build systems.
• GitHub Actions or Jenkins for CI/CD quality gates and certification workflows. GitHub Actions is a CI/CD platform for automating build, test, and deployment workflows.
• Allure Report for rich automation reporting, failure visibility, trends, timeline, retries, and certification evidence. Allure provides detailed HTML reports with analytics, timeline views, filtering, and history.
• k6 for performance guardrails and release-time performance checks. Grafana k6 supports automated performance testing and is used for load and performance validation.
• Selenium Grid where legacy browser matrix or distributed parallel browser execution is required. Selenium Grid is intended for running WebDriver tests in parallel across multiple machines and environments.
• Cypress as an optional secondary framework where existing projects already use it; Cypress supports CI parallelization across multiple machines.
• Appium if mobile app certification is part of scope, since Appium supports automation across mobile platforms and more.

What This Person Must Be Able to Do

• Certify a release very quickly without waiting for long regression cycles
• Design tiered certification suites, for example:
• 5–10 minute deployment smoke suite
• 15–20 minute critical business flow suite
• API and integration suite running in parallel
• scheduled deeper regression outside the fast release lane
• Build a system where every commit or release candidate gets a rapid quality verdict
• Decide when to block, allow, or rollback a release
• Keep test suites stable enough for frequent deployment
• Build confidence in quality without slowing engineering velocity

Preferred Background

• Experience in SaaS, enterprise applications, microservices, IoT platforms, fintech, logistics, retail, or high-volume transactional systems
• Experience with containerized environments and test execution in Docker-based CI
• Experience with service virtualization, mocks, stubs, and contract testing
• Experience with observability, log analysis, and production issue triage
• Experience in test data generation and ephemeral environments
• Exposure to Kubernetes-based deployment testing is a plus

Leadership Expectations

• Strong ownership of release quality
• Ability to lead from the front, not only coordinate
• Strong communication with engineering and DevOps
• Capability to challenge weak release processes and improve them
• Strong discipline in metrics, dashboards, and RCA
• Ability to train and raise the automation maturity of the QA team

KPIs for This RoleYou can add these KPIs in the internal profile:

• Release certification cycle time: under 30–45 minutes
• Critical flow automation coverage: 80%+
• False-failure / flaky-test rate: under 2–3%
• Escaped critical defects in certified releases: near zero
• Production smoke completion after deployment: under 10 minutes
• Mean triage time for failed release pipeline: under 15 minutes

Ideal Candidate ProfileThe ideal person is a release-certification powerhouse. He should think like a QA architect, move like a DevOps-aware automation engineer, and act like a release gate owner. He must be capable of building a strong automated certification system so the company can confidently push frequent releases without compromising stability.

Job Type: Full-time

Pay: Rs400,000.00 - Rs550,000.00 per month

Work Location: In person