Lead QA Automation Engineer

Role Overview

Lead QA Automation Engineer (hands-on leadership)

Own and improve the quality assurance process across HealthCentral’s web and mobile products, including media websites and the Drops app. This is a hands-on leadership role focused on maintaining and expanding an automation pipeline, improving process/scalability, and leading a small QA function.

Responsibilities

Test Automation Ownership

• Own, maintain, and improve automated testing pipelines for web and mobile.
• Build and maintain automated tests using Playwright (or similar browser automation).
• Improve reliability, reduce flaky tests, and optimize test execution time.
• Maintain and improve CI test workflows using GitHub Actions.
• Expand automation coverage for critical user flows, regression areas, and high-risk functionality.
• Define standards for how automated tests are written, reviewed, organized, and maintained.
• Partner with Engineering to ensure applications are testable and automation-friendly.
• Investigate failed runs, identify root causes, and coordinate fixes with Engineering.

QA Process and Strategy

• Define and improve QA processes across web and mobile products.
• Collaborate with Engineering on release quality standards, defect triage, regression planning, and QA workflow.
• Set the right balance between automated, manual, exploratory, and smoke testing.
• Create practical QA guidelines for feature validation, regression, release readiness, and production verification.
• Improve quality visibility via test reporting, defect trends, and release risk communication.
• Help implement quality gates that increase confidence without slowing delivery.

Manual QA Leadership

• Manage, support, and mentor the existing manual QA tester.
• Plan and coordinate manual testing across development, regression cycles, and releases.
• Ensure manual test cases are organized, current, and mapped to meaningful product coverage.
• Use Testiny to manage test cases, test runs, QA documentation, and regression coverage.
• Help onboard and mentor additional QA team members as the team grows.
• Create an operating model that works for a small team now and can scale.

Cross-Functional Collaboration

• Work with Engineering, Product, Design, and stakeholders to understand requirements, risks, and acceptance criteria.
• Participate in sprint planning, feature reviews, bug triage, and release planning.
• Communicate quality risks proactively.
• Identify gaps in requirements, edge cases, and UX issues.

Requirements

• Hands-on experience working directly in Playwright tests and CI pipelines.
• Enough experience to take ownership of both automation and QA process.
• Strong ability to manage manual QA execution and improve test planning.
• Pragmatic, organized leadership suited to building structure within a small QA team.

Nice-to-Haves / Expected Tools

• Familiarity with the current automation stack: Playwright, GitHub Actions, Testiny, Sauce Labs.