Role Purpose The Senior Automation Engineer holds a pivotal role in enhancing the efficiency and effectiveness of software development and delivery processes through the design, development, and implementation of test automation solutions. This role requires a strong technical background in test automation, excellent problem-solving skills, and the ability to work collaboratively with developers, business analysts, product owners, QAs and other stakeholders. Responsibilities Automation Design and Development: Design, develop, and maintain automation scripts and frameworks to support testing, deployment, and other aspects of the development lifecycle. Technical Leadership: Provide technical leadership and guidance to other automation engineers, helping to solve complex automation challenges and promote best practices. Tool Evaluation and Integration: Evaluate and integrate automation tools and frameworks into the software development lifecycle, ensuring they are used to their full potential. Continuous Integration and Deployment (CI/CD): Work on enhancing and maintaining CI/CD pipelines, ensuring automated builds, tests, and deployments are efficient and reliable. Performance Testing: Design and implement automation scripts for performance testing, ensuring software performance meets required non-functional requirements. Collaboration: Collaborate with developers, testers, and other stakeholders to understand their needs and provide automation solutions that add value. Troubleshooting and Optimisation: Troubleshoot issues within automation scripts and frameworks, optimising them for performance, reliability, and maintainability. Documentation: Maintain comprehensive documentation of automation scripts, frameworks, and processes, ensuring they are understandable and accessible to other team members. Training and Knowledge Sharing: Provide training and share knowledge on automation tools and best practices within the team and across the organisation. Quality Assurance: Ensure that automation scripts and frameworks meet quality standards, conducting code reviews and other quality assurance activities. Mentorship: Mentor QA team members, sharing knowledge and best practices to enhance the overall capabilities of the QA team. People Management: Manage a small number of Automation Engineers and be responsible for career development, objectives, performance reviews and other people management responsibilities. Continuous Improvement: Actively seek opportunities to improve automation processes and tools, staying up to date with industry best practices and emerging technologies Drive an ‘automation first’ approach to all testable items, using discussion, debate and risk to find the right balance between automated and non-automated testing. Promote and implement a Shift-Left approach to Testing and Automation. Skills and Experience Required Essential Minimum of 3 years’ experience in test automation engineering, automation tools, scripting languages, and test frameworks. Expert level test automation skills/knowledge: API/UI testing .NET C# Selenium SpecFlow/ReqnRoll Git / Azure DevOps CI/CD practices (Pipelines) Browser test automation using Browserstack ATDD, BDD & TDD Postman/SoapUI Performance testing – design and implementation using JMeter, K6 or equivalent Agile Test Quadrants and the Automation Test Pyramid Demonstrable ‘automation first’ mentality and adept at finding the right balance between automated, exploratory, functional, and non-functional testing Strong technical leadership & interpersonal skills Extensive experience working in both agile squads and project teams Desirable Understanding of the UK General Insurance market Experience using Ruby