Lead QA Automation Engineer

About the Role

We're looking for a Lead QA Automation Engineer to own the quality engineering practice on a Java/Spring Boot platform with a heavy API surface and AWS-native deployment. This is a hands-on lead role — you'll architect the automation strategy, write the framework code yourself, and set the bar for what "tested" means before anything ships. You'll work onsite with the engineering team in Herndon, partnering closely with developers, DevOps, and product to push quality upstream rather than catching it at the end.

The work is technical and consequential. You'll be the person engineers trust to tell them whether the build is actually safe to release, and you'll be expected to use AI-driven approaches — test generation, intelligent test selection, flaky-test triage — to make the suite faster and smarter, not just bigger.

What You'll Do

• Design and lead the test automation strategy across API, integration, and end-to-end layers
• Build and maintain the Karate framework for API testing — schemas, scenario coverage, data setup, parallelization
• Write and review Java/Spring Boot test code alongside the development team
• Integrate the test suite into CI/CD pipelines so quality gates run on every commit, not as an afterthought
• Apply AI-driven techniques to test creation, prioritization, and failure analysis
• Validate cloud-native behavior in AWS — services, data flows, environment parity, observability
• Mentor mid-level QA engineers on framework patterns, debugging discipline, and automation craft
• Own quality KPIs and report on coverage, defect escape rate, and pipeline health

Qualifications

• 7+ years building automated test frameworks for production systems
• Strong Java engineering chops — you write code that developers respect
• Production experience with Spring Boot applications, including testing strategies for microservices
• Deep hands-on experience with Karate for API contract and integration testing
• Track record integrating automated suites into CI/CD pipelines (Jenkins, GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, or similar)
• Working knowledge of AWS services and how to test against them (EC2, S3, Lambda, RDS, SQS, etc.)
• Experience applying AI-driven approaches to QA — test generation, smart test selection, failure clustering, or LLM-assisted debugging
• Lead-level instincts: comfortable setting strategy, coaching engineers, and pushing back when the release isn't ready

Preferred Skills

• Performance testing experience (JMeter, Gatling, or k6)
• Contract testing with Pact or similar
• Containerized test environments (Docker, Kubernetes)
• Security testing fundamentals
• Experience in regulated or compliance-heavy environments

Tech Stack

Java, Spring Boot, Karate, AWS (EC2, S3, Lambda, RDS, SQS), Jenkins/GitHub Actions, Docker, Git, Maven/Gradle, JUnit, REST APIs.

Who Thrives Here

Engineers who treat QA as a software discipline, not a checklist function. If you're the person on your current team who refactors flaky tests instead of disabling them, builds the framework other engineers want to extend, and is genuinely curious about what AI can do for test design — this role will give you the autonomy and the problem set to do your best work.