QE & Automation Lead

The Role

The QE & Automation Lead is accountable for QE-owned assurance across Entersekt's 3DS portfolio, including the Access Control Server, associated integrations and scheme certification obligations, together with delegated areas of the shared automation framework.

This role leads the Quality Engineers assigned to the portfolio while remaining actively involved in technical execution and decision-making. The incumbent is responsible for ensuring automation effectiveness, quality visibility, release confidence and continuous improvement in testing practices across the product line.

A fundamental aspect of the role is influencing engineering teams, product teams and delivery stakeholders to continuously improve product quality while supporting the needs of a highly regulated and security critical environment.

Responsibilities

Automation and Engineering Leadership

• Own the technical design and day-to-day health of QE-owned API, web, mobile, integration, end-to-end and regression automation frameworks.
• Lead automation delivery across Java, Playwright, Selenium WebDriver, TestNG, Maven and Appium.
• Remain hands-on through architecture decisions, code reviews, complex test implementation and root-cause analysis of automation failures.
• Drive regression reliability through deterministic test data, stable setup and teardown processes, transparent quarantine rules and active flaky-test reduction.
• Embed suitable automation suites and quality evidence into GitLab CI/CD pipelines.
• Progress quality gates from monitored thresholds towards enforced automated controls where appropriate.

Release Assurance and Quality Intelligence

• Develop risk-based test strategies aligned to customer impact, architecture, regulatory obligations, scheme requirements, integration risk and production history.
• Produce evidence-based release assessments covering testing scope, automation outcomes, open defects, coverage limitations, residual risk and release recommendations.
• Ensure release feedback is available early enough to influence delivery decisions.
• Maintain traceable, reproducible certification, compliance and audit evidence, including scheme certification obligations.
• Monitor and report on regression health, risk coverage, defect escape rates, repeat incidents and automation reliability.
• Convert root-cause findings into ongoing quality improvements and corrective test coverage.

People Leadership

• Lead, mentor and develop Quality Engineers within the 3DS portfolio.
• Manage performance through continuous and actionable feedback.
• Ensure development and growth discussions are ongoing and that formal reviews contain no surprises.
• Support team capability development and capacity planning.

Cross-Functional Leadership

• Coach Development and Product teams on shift-left quality practices.
• Reinforce developer ownership of unit, component and feature-functional testing.
• Where ownership is not sufficiently established, actively drive improvements.
• Partner closely with Agile Delivery Leads and Scrum Masters regarding readiness, planning and dependencies.
• Collaborate with Platform and DevOps teams on environments, test data management and observability.
• Resolve quality concerns directly with accountable engineering and delivery stakeholders.
• Escalate appropriately only where issues remain unresolved or exceed agreed risk tolerances.

Continuous Improvement

• Establish and maintain an agreed quality baseline.
• Improve test automation maturity, regression effectiveness and engineering quality practices.
• Reduce defect escape rates, repeat incidents and unnecessary escalations.
• Increase early engagement between QE, Development, Product and Delivery teams.
• Drive measurable improvements to quality outcomes throughout the product lifecycle.

Skills and Experience

Successful candidates for this role will generally possess the following qualifications and skills:

• 6+ years of software quality engineering and test automation experience.
• Demonstrated technical leadership of automation frameworks or complex testing solutions.
• Strong Java knowledge and object-oriented design expertise.
• Significant hands-on experience with Playwright, Selenium WebDriver, TestNG, Maven and Appium, or equivalent technologies with the ability to become effective quickly.
• Experience designing API, web, mobile, integration and end-to-end automation solutions for distributed service-based systems.
• Strong CI/CD and GitLab pipeline experience, including:
  • Parallelisation
  • Automated quality gates
  • Reporting and visibility
  • Failure diagnosis and troubleshooting
• Experience treating flaky tests, test data challenges and environment stability as engineering reliability problems.
• Strong risk management judgement and experience creating risk-based test strategies and release assessments.
• Experience leading, mentoring and developing engineering teams.
• Performance management, coaching and capacity planning experience.
• Working knowledge of AI-assisted software engineering for test design, code generation, maintenance and failure analysis.
• Demonstrated ability to critically evaluate AI-generated outputs and deliver measurable value from AI-enabled practices.
• Advantageous:
  • 3D Secure (3DS) experience.
  • EMVCo scheme certification experience.
  • Payments industry experience.
  • Experience working in regulated or security-critical environments.
  • Contract testing experience.
  • Service virtualisation experience.
  • Performance testing experience.
  • Application security testing experience.
  • JUnit 5.
  • Containers and container platforms.
  • Device farms.
  • Observability tooling.
  • Experience improving automation maturity in established, long-lived codebases with inherited test coverage.

Personality Attributes

Weighted equally with technical depth, as much of the role's success depends on influencing teams that do not report directly to the QE function.

• Strong problem-solving and analytical thinking skills.
• Clear and effective communicator with both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Comfortable working independently and taking ownership.
• Collaborative team player with a pragmatic, delivery-focused mindset.
• Strong attention to quality, security and maintainability.