Quality Engineering Lead / Test Automation Architect

Role Description The Quality Engineering Lead / Test Automation Architect / Performance Testing Specialist develops and implements quality engineering practices that improve the reliability, performance, and readiness of software products. This role combines test strategy, automation architecture, and performance evaluation to help teams identify defects early, assess technical risks, and deliver dependable applications and services. The position works closely with Software Engineering, Product, DevOps, Site Reliability Engineering, Security, and business stakeholders. Responsibilities include defining test coverage, designing reusable automation frameworks, integrating tests into delivery pipelines, and coordinating functional, integration, regression, and end-to-end testing. Performance responsibilities include modelling realistic workloads, conducting load, stress, endurance, and scalability tests, and analysing application behaviour to identify bottlenecks and capacity constraints. At lead or architect level, the role establishes testing standards, guides tool selection, mentors quality engineers, and improves the maintainability and effectiveness of automated tests. It defines measurable quality objectives, manages test environments and data requirements, and communicates release risks and performance findings. The role also works with engineering teams to strengthen observability, investigate failures, reduce unreliable tests, and ensure that testing provides useful evidence for release and infrastructure decisions. Qualifications Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Information Technology, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.Significant experience in software quality engineering, test automation, performance testing, or quality assurance for complex applications.Experience developing test strategies, assessing product risks, defining coverage, and coordinating testing across multiple systems or teams.Strong programming skills in languages such as Java, Python, JavaScript, TypeScript, or C# for building maintainable test solutions.Experience designing automation frameworks using tools such as Playwright, Selenium, Cypress, Appium, or comparable technologies.Strong knowledge of API testing, service integration, contract testing, and validation of REST, GraphQL, or messaging-based interfaces.Experience integrating automated tests into CI/CD pipelines and using version control, build systems, and test-result reporting.Practical experience with performance-testing tools such as JMeter, k6, Gatling, LoadRunner, or comparable platforms.Ability to design realistic workload models and execute load, stress, spike, endurance, and scalability tests against defined requirements.Strong understanding of response times, latency percentiles, throughput, concurrency, error rates, resource utilisation, and capacity constraints.Ability to analyse logs, metrics, traces, and profiling results to investigate failures and support performance improvements.Familiarity with cloud platforms, containers, distributed systems, databases, caching, and infrastructure behaviour under load.Experience managing test environments, preparing representative test data, and applying appropriate access and data-protection controls.Ability to mentor engineers, review test code, reduce test flakiness, and establish effective quality practices within Agile delivery teams.Excellent analytical, communication, stakeholder-management, and problem-solving skills, with the ability to explain quality risks and testing evidence clearly.