Senior Automation Engineer

The Senior Automation Engineer holds a pivotal role in enhancing the efficiency and effectiveness of software development and delivery processes through the design, development, and implementation of test automation solutions.

This role requires a strong technical background in test automation, excellent problem-solving skills, and the ability to work collaboratively with developers, business analysts, product owners, QAs and other stakeholders.

• Automation Design and Development: Design, develop, and maintain automation scripts and frameworks to support testing, deployment, and other aspects of the development lifecycle.
• Technical Leadership: Provide technical leadership and guidance to other automation engineers, helping to solve complex automation challenges and promote best practices.
• Tool Evaluation and Integration: Evaluate and integrate automation tools and frameworks into the software development lifecycle, ensuring they are used to their full potential.
• Continuous Integration and Deployment (CI/CD): Work on enhancing and maintaining CI/CD pipelines, ensuring automated builds, tests, and deployments are efficient and reliable.
• Performance Testing: Design and implement automation scripts for performance testing, ensuring software performance meets required non-functional requirements.
• Collaboration: Collaborate with developers, testers, and other stakeholders to understand their needs and provide automation solutions that add value.
• Troubleshooting and Optimisation: Troubleshoot issues within automation scripts and frameworks, optimising them for performance, reliability, and maintainability.
• Documentation: Maintain comprehensive documentation of automation scripts, frameworks, and processes, ensuring they are understandable and accessible to other team members.
• Training and Knowledge Sharing: Provide training and share knowledge on automation tools and best practices within the team and across the organisation.
• Quality Assurance: Ensure that automation scripts and frameworks meet quality standards, conducting code reviews and other quality assurance activities.
• Mentorship: Mentor QA team members, sharing knowledge and best practices to enhance the overall capabilities of the QA team.
• People Management: Manage a small number of Automation Engineers and be responsible for career development, objectives, performance reviews and other people management responsibilities.
• Continuous Improvement: Actively seek opportunities to improve automation processes and tools, staying up to date with industry best practices and emerging technologies
• Drive an ‘automation first’ approach to all testable items, using discussion, debate and risk to find the right balance between automated and non-automated testing. Promote and implement a Shift-Left approach to Testing and Automation.

• Minimum of 3 years’ experience in test automation engineering, automation tools, scripting languages, and test frameworks.
• Expert level test automation skills/knowledge:
  • API/UI testing
  • .NET C#
  • Selenium
  • SpecFlow/ReqnRoll
  • Git / Azure DevOps
  • CI/CD practices (Pipelines)
  • Browser test automation using Browserstack
  • ATDD, BDD & TDD
  • Postman/SoapUI
  • Performance testing – design and implementation using JMeter, K6 or equivalent
  • Agile Test Quadrants and the Automation Test Pyramid
• Demonstrable ‘automation first’ mentality and adept at finding the right balance between automated, exploratory, functional, and non-functional testing
• Strong technical leadership & interpersonal skills
• Extensive experience working in both agile squads and project teams

• Understanding of the UK General Insurance market
• Experience using Ruby