Lead Automation Engineer

Odaseva provides enterprise data management and security solutions that help organizations exercise sovereignty over their critical data. Companies representing 10% of global market capitalization trust Odaseva, including Schneider Electric, Volkswagen and Robert Half. Its Excalibur Data Platform enables customers to protect, secure, move, and use data and code independently of application vendors. The platform supports complex and high-volume use cases, including backup, archiving, zero-copy, BCDR & High Availability, data federation, and semantic AI orchestration. Customer-controlled end-to-end encryption raises the bar for enterprise security. With 11 patents, Odaseva manages 50 trillion records and supports 100 million users. About The Role We are looking for a Lead Automation Engineer to drive the automation strategy across our Quality Engineering organization. This is a hands-on technical leadership role: you will architect and evolve reactive test automation frameworks, own API and UI test coverage, embed automation deeply into CI/CD, and bring AI-driven approaches into everyday QE practice. You will also act as a backup to the QA Manager, stepping in on team coordination, planning, and stakeholder reporting when needed. Key Responsibilities Automation Strategy & Framework Ownership • Design, build, and maintain reactive, scalable test automation frameworks from the ground up • Define automation standards, coding conventions, and best practices across the QE team • Continuously evaluate and evolve the toolchain to keep pace with product and team growth Technical Execution • Lead UI test automation using Playwright, including page object patterns, parallelization, and cross-browser strategy • Own API test automation and using Postman and Pactum JS (collections, environments, automated test scripts, monitors) • Integrate automated test suites deeply into CI/CD pipelines, optimizing for speed, reliability, and actionable failure reporting • Champion a "shift-left" approach, embedding automation earlier in the development lifecycle AI-Driven Quality Engineering • Identify and implement practical AI applications within QE workflows: test generation, self-healing tests, intelligent triage of flaky tests, coverage gap analysis, and reporting automation • Stay current on AI-assisted testing tools and evaluate their fit for the team's stack and maturity level Leadership & Team Support • Mentor QE engineers on automation best practices, framework usage, and debugging • Act as backup to the QA Manager: covering team check-ins, sprint planning, release quality gates, and stakeholder updates in their absence • Partner with engineering, product, and release management to align automation coverage with release priorities Reporting & Continuous Improvement • Track and report automation coverage, execution health, and ROI metrics to engineering leadership • Drive root-cause analysis on test failures and flaky tests, feeding improvements back into the framework Required Qualifications • Master’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related quantitative discipline. • 8 years+ of software engineering, quality assurance/engineering. • Proven experience building test automation frameworks from scratch. • Strong, hands-on experience with Playwright for UI automation. • Strong, hands-on experience with Postman for API testing and automation. • Experience with Gherkin/BDD frameworks. • Solid CI/CD experience (e.g., Jenkins, GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, or similar), including pipeline design for test execution. • Practical experience applying AI tools/techniques within a QA or QE context. • Familiarity with test data strategy and orchestration for complex, multi-step workflows. • Experience mentoring or