Senior Automation Test Engineer/Test Lead in London

Spencer Rose are looking for an experienced Senior Automation Test Engineer/Test Lead who can take end-to-end ownership of testing and help shape the overall quality and automation strategy for our Banking client located in Central London.

Start: ASAP
Location: City of London - 2 days a week onsite
Rate: £400-410 per INSIDE IR35
Duration: 6-12 month contract

The ideal candidate should be a strong hands-on automation engineer as well as a technical test leader. They should be capable of taking a project from having limited automation to establishing a robust E2E functional and performance testing framework from scratch, while providing leadership and direction to the wider testing team.

Key Responsibilities

• Take end-to-end ownership of testing activities, from test planning and strategy through execution, automation and reporting.
• Define and shape the overall test strategy, automation approach and quality processes.
• Design and build E2E test automation frameworks from scratch covering both functional and performance testing.
• Develop, maintain and enhance scalable automation solutions using Playwright.
• Drive automation across UI, API and end-to-end testing.
• Design and execute performance, load, stress and scalability testing to validate system performance.
• Integrate functional and performance automated tests into CI/CD pipelines.
• Lead and mentor QA/Test Engineers, providing technical guidance and helping improve automation capability across the team.
• Work closely with developers, Product Owners and other stakeholders to ensure quality throughout the delivery lifecycle.
• Identify testing risks, dependencies and coverage gaps early in the delivery process.
• Drive continuous improvement in testing standards, tools, frameworks and processes.
• Actively participate in Agile ceremonies including sprint planning, refinement, stand-ups, reviews and retrospectives.

Essential Skills & Experience

• Extensive hands-on experience in automation testing.
• Strong experience in designing and building E2E automation frameworks from scratch.
• Extensive hands-on knowledge of Playwright.
• Strong experience in API testing and API automation.
• Good knowledge and hands-on experience in performance testing, including load, stress and scalability testing.
• Experience designing automation frameworks that support both functional and performance testing.
• Strong understanding of CI/CD and integrating automated tests into deployment pipelines.
• Experience taking complete ownership of testing for a project, product or application.
• Previous experience leading, mentoring and providing technical direction to a testing team.
• Ability to define and improve test strategy, automation strategy and regression coverage.
• Good knowledge of Agile methodologies and experience working within Agile delivery teams.
• Excellent communication skills, with the ability to communicate effectively with technical teams, business stakeholders and leadership.
• Strong analytical and problem-solving skills.

Good to Have

• Knowledge of Google Cloud Platform (GCP) concepts.
• Experience testing cloud-based applications, microservices and distributed systems.
• Knowledge of performance-testing tools and performance monitoring/analysis.
• Experience with cloud-based CI/CD and deployment processes.

If available, APPLY NOW, to be reviewed immediately