Senior AQA Engineer

WPP is the trusted growth partner for the world’s leading brands. We unite cutting-edge media intelligence and data solutions, world-class creativity, next-generation production, transformative enterprise solutions and expert strategic counsel in a single company – powered by exceptional talent and our agentic marketing platform, WPP Open, to help our clients navigate change, capture opportunity and deliver transformational growth. We work with the world's most valuable brands and have global reach across 100+ markets, with deep local expertise. Our people are the key to our success. We're committed to fostering a culture of creativity, belonging and continuous learning, attracting and developing the brightest talent, and providing exciting career opportunities that help our people grow. For more information, visit WPP.com. Role Purpose: WPP is undergoing an exciting global transformation, and we are seeking an experienced and detail-oriented Senior Automation Quality Analyst, specialising in Playwright, to join our Central QA team. In this senior role you will lead the automation of our regression and end-to-end test suites, set the standard for test quality across the team, and act as a go-to technical reference for other QA engineers.You will be instrumental in sustaining the reliability of our platform under a trunk-based, continuously delivered way of working, where quality has to be built in early rather than inspected at the end. Beyond strong automation fundamentals, we are looking for someone attuned to modern, AI-assisted ways of working — using AI tooling to accelerate test design, authoring and analysis without compromising rigour. This is a senior position with a clear path towards a QA Lead role for the right person. We encourage applications from a diverse range of backgrounds and experiences. Key Responsibilities: As a Senior Automation Quality Analyst, you will: Automation and test engineering • Lead the design, build and maintenance of automated end-to-end and regression suites using Playwright with TypeScript/JavaScript. • Analyse business requirements and translate them into robust, maintainable test cases and automation coverage. • Perform formal and exploratory testing; execute and review both automated and manual test cases. • Identify, document and track defects, providing clear and concise descriptions that allow developers to reproduce and resolve issues efficiently. • Conduct regression testing to verify that resolved issues do not affect existing functionality. Continuous delivery and the merge gate • Embed testing into the CI/CD pipeline, keeping the merge gate reliable and the nightly regression green. • Use AI tooling to accelerate test authoring, data creation and defect analysis, applying sound judgement to validate AI-assisted output. • Collaborate with developers to identify the root cause of issues, and with SRE and DevOps to keep test environments and test data stable. • Lead testing activities during sprints and releases. • Communicate complex issues clearly to both business and technical stakeholders, and report test results. • Define and apply the criteria for what belongs in the merge gate versus the nightly suite, keeping gate suites within an agreed time budget so they give fast, trustworthy feedback. • Own test stability — triage flaky tests, apply the quarantine policy, and drive fixes so confidence in automated results is maintained. • Design test coverage appropriate to each environment as code progresses from integration through to pre-production and performance environments. • Provide test evidence to support release readiness and the Go/No-Go decision. Standards, mentoring and hand-over • Set and uphold automation standards; review other engineers' test ca