Principal QA Automation Engineer, Team Lead

ABOUT ENGAGEWARE

Engageware helps financial institutions and enterprises provide seamless, customer-centric experiences through an AI-powered platform offering appointment scheduling, virtual assistants, and customer engagement solutions. Our platform enhances digital and in-person interactions, streamlining customer journeys across multiple touchpoints.

🌎 Open to LATAM-based contractors in Spanish-speaking countries (Mexico, Argentina, Colombia, and others) | Bilingual: Spanish & English required

ABOUT THE ROLE

We're scaling our QA practice and need a leader who can build and guide a high-performing, distributed team while staying deeply technical and hands-on. As Principal QA Automation Engineer, Team Lead, you will serve as the central pillar of quality across all Engageware products — owning the automation strategy, standardizing engineering practices, and directly managing a team of QA automation engineers distributed across our product squads.

You'll report directly to the VP of Engineering and play a strategic role in defining what "done" truly means across our engineering organization. From establishing automation standards and enforcing the Definition of Done, to building robust CI/CD pipelines and leveraging AI to accelerate testing, you will elevate quality at every level — and do it by example.

This role is for a bilingual (Spanish/English) leader who is comfortable operating across cultures, product domains, and technical stacks. You will be hands-on in the code every day while simultaneously guiding your team's growth, coordinating with product squads, and reporting quality trends to engineering leadership.

If you thrive on owning quality end-to-end, love building systems that scale, and want your leadership to have a measurable impact on everything engineering ships — this is the role for you.

KEY RESPONSIBILITIES

Team Leadership & People Management

• Directly manage a distributed team of QA automation engineers — including hiring, onboarding, performance management, and career development.
• Conduct regular 1:1s, set clear goals, provide ongoing feedback, and run performance reviews for all direct reports.
• Partner with the VP of Engineering on team structure, headcount planning, and organizational design as the QA function grows.
• Serve as the single point of accountability for quality standards across the entire engineering organization.
• Define, document, and enforce Definition of Done criteria in collaboration with engineering and product leadership.
• Drive adoption of shared testing standards, automation patterns, and tooling across all product squads.
• Report on quality metrics, test coverage trends, defect patterns, and release readiness to the VP of Engineering.
• Foster a culture of quality, ownership, and continuous improvement within the QA team and the broader engineering org.

Hands-On Automation

• Personally architect, build, and maintain automation frameworks for both UI and API testing across multiple product domains.
• Implement Playwright as the primary E2E test framework, covering complex UI flows in Angular and React applications.
• Build and maintain comprehensive API test suites covering REST, SOAP, and WSDL interfaces.
• Write automation in multiple languages including Java and TypeScript/JavaScript, selecting the right tool for each context.
• Leverage AI tooling (Claude and others) heavily — for test generation, coverage gap analysis, and reducing maintenance burden.
• Build regression, smoke, and integration test suites that execute reliably within CI/CD pipelines on every deployment.

CI/CD & DevOps Collaboration

• Integrate and maintain automated test suites within our current Jenkins-based CI/CD pipelines, and help shape the path forward as we migrate to Bitbucket Pipelines and/or GitHub Actions.
• Define environment promotion gating criteria and build release confidence signals (dashboards, alerts, readiness reports).
• Integrate test results, coverage trends, and flakiness metrics into observability tooling.
• Partner with DevOps to ensure test infrastructure evolves with the team and scales through the pipeline migration.

Coverage & Cross-Squad Collaboration

• Oversee quality for all Engageware products: Aivo suite (Virtual Assistant, Live Chat, AgentBot, Studio) and Appointment Scheduling.
• Collaborate with product managers and engineers to define acceptance criteria and testability requirements per squad.
• Execute and evolve functional, regression, integration, and end-to-end test strategies.
• Identify, document, and track defects in Jira; surface defect patterns and root-cause prevention strategies to engineering leadership.

TECHNICAL REQUIREMENTS

• Proven hands-on expertise with Playwright for modern end-to-end UI and API test automation at scale.
• Strong proficiency in TypeScript/JavaScript and Java for test framework development.
• Experience testing Angular and React frontend applications.
• Deep experience with API testing — REST, SOAP, and WSDL interfaces.
• Experience architecting test frameworks from the ground up, not just maintaining existing ones.
• CI/CD pipeline experience with Bitbucket Pipelines and/or GitHub Actions.
• Active, hands-on use of AI tools (Claude, Copilot, or similar) in day-to-day QA workflows.
• Demonstrated people management experience: hiring, performance management, career development, and team building in a distributed/remote environment.
• Proven ability to lead a QA team embedded across multiple squads while maintaining consistent standards and individual accountability.
• Strong software engineering fundamentals: clean code, design patterns, Git-based version control, code review practices.
• Experience working across multiple deployed environments and distributed SaaS systems.

Preferred / Nice to Have

• Experience with Python, Behave, and Selenium (for legacy suite migration context).
• Familiarity with database testing (MySQL, Amazon Redshift).
• Knowledge of AWS services (Lambda, ECS, RDS, CloudWatch).
• Experience with performance or load testing frameworks (k6, Locust, Gatling).
• Familiarity with observability and reporting tools (Datadog, ReportPortal, LangFuse).
• Background in SaaS products serving financial services or regulated industries.

WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR

• You lead people, not just projects — you invest in your team's growth, hold people accountable with clarity and empathy, and take retention and engagement personally.
• You stay in the code — you don't delegate what you won't do yourself, and your team follows your example because they see you doing the hard work.
• You think at the system level: you don't just write tests, you design quality systems that scale across teams and squads.
• You bridge technical depth and executive clarity — equally comfortable pairing with an engineer on a tricky WSDL test and presenting quality trends to the VP of Engineering.
• You set standards through craft, not title. You earn credibility by being the person the team turns to when something is hard to test.
• You're energized by ambiguity — you can define structure where none exists and turn a blank-slate quality practice into something the whole engineering organization adopts.
• You genuinely care about developer experience: you know a test suite only gets adopted if it's fast, reliable, and easy to contribute to.

QUALIFICATIONS

• 7+ years of experience in Quality Assurance, Test Automation, or Software Development in Test (SDET) roles.
• 2+ years in a formal team lead or engineering management role with direct reports — not just technical mentorship.
• Native or advanced Spanish proficiency required; advanced English proficiency required — this is a bilingual role.
• Degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Information Systems, or a related field — or equivalent practical experience.
• Experience in agile environments (Scrum/Kanban); comfortable with iterative delivery and fast release cadences.