Lead Automation Engineer - Leeds

Lead Automation Engineer - Leeds, UK

Ready to lead the future of quality engineering and become the driving force behind our test automation strategy?

Want to build scalable automation frameworks that improve software quality, accelerate delivery, and enhance customer experiences?

Excited by the opportunity to combine hands-on automation expertise with technical leadership, mentoring, and strategic influence?

As our Lead Automation Engineer, you'll play a pivotal role in shaping and driving our approach to quality engineering across digital products and platforms. You'll lead the design and implementation of modern test automation frameworks, champion best practice testing approaches, and help embed quality throughout the software development lifecycle.

Working within a collaborative Agile environment, you'll combine hands-on automation engineering with team leadership and stakeholder engagement, ensuring the delivery of robust, reliable, and high-quality software solutions that make a meaningful difference to our clients.

What will you be doing?

As the technical lead for test automation, you'll define and implement the automation strategy across multiple projects and products, ensuring quality is embedded from the earliest stages of delivery. You'll design, build, and maintain scalable automation frameworks using Playwright and Vitest, enabling efficient, reliable, and repeatable testing across our applications.

Remaining hands-on, you'll develop automated test suites using BDD and Gherkin-based approaches, creating robust test scenarios that support both rapid delivery and long-term maintainability. You'll work closely with engineers, Product Owners, and stakeholders to ensure testing is integrated throughout the development lifecycle and aligned with business objectives.

You'll lead automation delivery within Agile squads, helping shape technical solutions, supporting planning and estimation activities, and ensuring automation capabilities keep pace with product development. Through effective use of tools such as Jira and BrowserStack, you'll coordinate test execution, defect management, cross-browser testing, and reporting activities to provide visibility and confidence in software quality.

As a people leader and mentor, you'll provide day-to-day guidance to both manual and automation testers, helping build capability across Playwright, Gherkin, BrowserStack, and modern quality engineering practices. You'll foster a culture of ownership, collaboration, and continuous improvement while supporting onboarding and development across the wider team.

You'll also champion operational excellence by defining meaningful quality metrics, improving testing processes, supporting root cause analysis and incident investigations, and driving improvements in application reliability, automation productivity, and delivery velocity. Alongside this, you'll act as a trusted advisor to stakeholders across the business, promoting quality engineering as a strategic enabler of successful digital delivery.

You will bring

Your passion for quality engineering, automation, and continuous improvement to a role where you'll influence both technology strategy and delivery outcomes. You'll have strong hands-on experience with Playwright, Vitest, JavaScript and/or TypeScript, alongside a proven track record of designing and implementing successful automation frameworks.

You'll bring deep knowledge of automated testing approaches, including behaviour-driven development and Gherkin-based frameworks, together with experience integrating automated testing into CI/CD pipelines. Your understanding of Agile delivery practices and modern software development principles will enable you to embed quality throughout the development lifecycle.

You'll be an effective leader and mentor, capable of developing high-performing teams while providing technical guidance and support. Whether you're coaching engineers, establishing testing standards, managing automation delivery, or engaging stakeholders, you'll be passionate about creating a culture where quality is everyone's responsibility.

Experience with tools such as BrowserStack, Jira, Azure DevOps, GitHub Actions, or Jenkins would be beneficial. Additional exposure to API, performance, and security testing, as well as ISTQB qualifications, would be advantageous. Most importantly, you'll bring a proactive mindset, excellent communication skills, and a commitment to delivering exceptional software quality.

Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion

Equality, diversity, and inclusion are incredibly important to us; we have a culture of belonging. We're always looking to increase the diversity of our workforce to ensure we can provide the best service possible for everyone. It's not just about the professional experience you bring we're interested in who you are and your potential.

If there's an adjustment to our recruitment process that would help you to be your best, speak to our team and they'll be happy to help.