Lead QA Automation Engineer (Playwright) with Insurance (Warren, NJ 07059) Onsite

Hello, My name is Pinki, and I am a Staffing Specialist at TestingXperts. I am reaching out to you on an exciting job opportunity with one of our clients. Role: Lead QA Automation Engineer (Playwright) with Insurance (Warren, NJ 07059) Onsite Location: Warren, NJ 07059 Domain: Insurance Work Arrangement: Hybrid (3 days in a Week) Role Overview We are looking for an experienced Lead QA Automation Engineer with strong hands-on expertise in Playwright to lead the quality engineering practice across our web applications and services. The ideal candidate has 8+ years of progressive QA experience - including automation framework design, test strategy, CI/CD-integrated testing, and team leadership. You will define the quality roadmap, mentor a team of QA engineers, and drive a shift-left, automation-first culture across the engineering organization. Key Responsibilities Test Strategy & Leadership Define and own the end-to-end test strategy across functional, regression, integration, API, performance, and accessibility testing. Establish quality gates, KPIs, and SLAs for releases; report quality metrics to engineering and product leadership. Drive a shift-left quality culture: in-sprint automation, risk-based testing, and early defect prevention. Evaluate and select tools, frameworks, and processes that improve test efficiency and coverage. Automation Framework & Engineering Architect, build, and maintain a scalable, reusable Playwright-based test automation framework (TypeScript/JavaScript). Design Page Object Model (POM) / Screenplay / fixture-based patterns for maintainability and reuse. Implement parallel, cross-browser, and cross-device test execution (Chromium, Firefox, WebKit, mobile emulation). Build API test automation using Playwright API testing, REST Assured, Supertest, or Postman/Newman. Develop and maintain data-driven, BDD (Cucumber/Gherkin), and tag-based test execution strategies. Implement visual regression, accessibility, and contract testing where appropriate. CI/CD & DevOps Integration Integrate automated tests into CI/CD pipelines using GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Jenkins, Azure DevOps, or CircleCI. Configure test environments, containerized test execution (Docker), and cloud test grids (BrowserStack, Sauce Labs, LambdaTest). Implement intelligent retries, flaky test detection, test sharding, and trace/video/screenshot capture for diagnostics. Drive reporting and observability with Allure, Playwright HTML reporter, ReportPortal, or custom dashboards. Team Leadership & Mentorship Lead, mentor, and grow a team of QA and SDET engineers; conduct interviews and hire top quality engineering talent. Perform code reviews of automation scripts, enforce standards, and continuously improve quality of test code. Coach manual testers on transitioning to automation and engineering best practices. Champion Agile/Scrum ceremonies - sprint planning, refinement, retros - from the QA perspective. Collaboration & Delivery Partner with developers, product managers, designers, and DevOps to ensure quality is owned across the team. Participate in design and architecture reviews to identify testability concerns early. Collaborate with performance, security, and SRE teams for non-functional testing (JMeter, k6, Gatling, OWASP ZAP). Drive root cause analysis (RCA) for production incidents and feed learnings back into test coverage. Required Skills & Qualifications Core QA & Automation QA experience with test automation. hands-on, production-grade experience with Playwright (TypeScript preferred). Proven ability to design and scale automation frameworks from scratch. Strong programming skills in TypeScript/JavaScript; familiarity with Java, Python, or C# is a plus. Deep understanding of QA methodologies - STLC, Agile testing quadrants, risk-based testing, exploratory testing. Playwright Expertise Expert with Playwright Test Runner, fixtures, projects, parallelization, and worker management. Strong command of auto-waiting, locators, role-based selectors, and resilient test design. Experience with Playwright API testing, network mocking, request interception, and route handling. Hands-on with Playwright tracing, codegen, debugging, and CI integration. Experience with component testing using Playwright Experimental Component Testing or similar. Testing Types & Tools API testing with Playwright APIRequest, REST Assured, Postman/Newman, or Supertest. BDD frameworks: Cucumber, Playwright-BDD, SpecFlow, or Behave. Performance/load testing exposure: JMeter, k6, Gatling, or Locust. Accessibility testing: axe-core, Playwright accessibility checks, Lighthouse CI. Visual regression: Playwright snapshots, Percy, Applitools, or Chromatic. Mobile testing exposure: Playwright mobile emulation, Appium, or BrowserStack App Live (nice to have). CI/CD, Cloud & DevOps Hands-on with GitHub Actions, Jenkins, GitLab CI, Azure DevOps, or CircleCI for test pipelines. Experience containerizing tests with Docker; familiarity with Kubernetes is a plus. Familiarity with AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud Platform for test infrastructure and environments. Hands-on with cloud-based test grids: BrowserStack, Sauce Labs, LambdaTest. Quality Engineering Practices Strong grasp of test pyramid, contract testing (Pact), and shift-left/shift-right testing. Experience with test data management, synthetic data generation, and environment management. Familiarity with feature flagging and progressive delivery (LaunchDarkly, Unleash) for safe rollouts. Solid understanding of SDLC, defect lifecycle, and tools like Jira, Xray, Zephyr, TestRail, or qTest. Web & API Fundamentals Strong understanding of HTML, CSS, DOM, JavaScript runtime, and browser internals. Solid grasp of HTTP, REST, GraphQL, WebSockets, authentication (OAuth 2.0, JWT, SSO). Comfortable reading and writing SQL; experience validating data in relational and NoSQL databases. Familiarity with microservices, event-driven architectures, and message brokers (Kafka, RabbitMQ). Leadership & Soft Skills Proven experience leading QA/SDET teams and owning quality for multiple products or modules. Excellent communication, stakeholder management, and reporting skills. Strong analytical, troubleshooting, and root-cause analysis abilities. Ability to balance speed and quality, and to make pragmatic, data-driven trade-offs. Passion for quality, continuous improvement, and engineering excellence. Nice to Have Experience with security testing (OWASP ZAP, Burp Suite) and basic threat modeling. Exposure to AI-assisted testing tools, self-healing tests, or LLM-based test generation. Contributions to open-source QA/automation projects or a strong technical blog. Experience in regulated domains - Insurance, BFSI, or Healthcare. Relevant certifications: ISTQB Advanced, Certified Agile Tester, AWS/Azure certifications