Test Lead - Automation

Role: SDET lead 

Location: Mclean, VA

Experience Required: 9-15 years 

Senior Quality Engineering & Test Automation Lead 

• We're hiring a hands-on technical lead — not a people manager — to be the testing authority across a mission-critical program comprising 20+ microservices and four product teams.
• You'll unify testing practices, build automation frameworks, and drive quality across the board.
• Four product teams at varying testing maturity levels.
• Agile delivery with CI/CD pipelines and rapid release cycles What You'll Do Test Strategy & Standardization • 
• Assess testing gaps across all teams and define a unified test strategy (functional, regression, integration, contract, E2E, performance).
• Establish shared frameworks, conventions, quality gates, and reporting standards.
• Build a reusable, scalable test automation architecture across all microservices Hands-On Automation Engineering.
• Personally design, build, and maintain automated test frameworks — this is a coding role.
• Build API test suites using Rest Assured, Karate, Postman, and Bruno.
• Build UI test suites using Playwright (preferred).
• Develop data-driven/keyword-driven frameworks in Java using OOP and proven design patterns.
• Write complex SQL/NoSQL queries for backend data validation across relational (Oracle, SQL Server, PostgreSQL, MySQL) and non-relational databases (MongoDB) CI/CD & Pipeline Quality.
• Integrate test suites into CI/CD pipelines (Jenkins, GitLab CI).
• Implement shift-left testing, automated regression gates, and parallel execution strategies.
• Coordinate test environment management across teams AI-Driven Testing.
• Evaluate and adopt AI/ML tools for test generation, intelligent test selection, self-healing automation, and defect prediction.
• Use generative AI to accelerate test creation and exploratory testing.
• Build smart test prioritization models using historical data Reporting & Metrics