Senior AQA Engineer

Overview

Senior Automation Quality Analyst specialising in Playwright, joining WPP's Central QA team to lead automation of regression and end-to-end test suites, set test quality standards, and act as a technical reference for other QA engineers.

What you'll do

• 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 descriptions that allow developers to reproduce and resolve issues efficiently.
• Conduct regression testing to verify that resolved issues do not affect existing functionality.
• 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 root causes of issues, and with SRE and DevOps to keep test environments and test data stable.
• Lead testing activities during sprints and releases, and communicate complex issues and test results to business and technical stakeholders.
• Define and apply the criteria for what belongs in the merge gate versus the nightly suite, keeping gate suites within an agreed time budget.
• Own test stability: triage flaky tests, apply the quarantine policy, and drive fixes.
• 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.
• Set and uphold automation standards; review other engineers' test cases and automated tests, and mentor QA engineers on good practice.
• Stabilise test suites and hand them over to POD teams, supporting developers in maintaining them once ownership transfers.
• Work across multiple POD teams and codebases, adapting to differing priorities while keeping a consistent quality bar.
• Participate in design and requirement reviews, providing input on testability and quality risks.
• Contribute to continuous improvement of QA processes and methodologies, and keep current with industry trends and best practice.
• Support investigation of production incidents where test coverage or quality is a contributing factor.

What you'll need

• 6–8 years' proven experience as an automation QA or test engineer, with a track record of owning automation on complex web applications.
• Strong, hands-on expertise in Playwright with TypeScript, designing and maintaining automation frameworks from the ground up.
• Solid understanding of software testing methodologies, tools and processes, of the software development lifecycle (SDLC), and of trunk-based and continuous delivery workflows.
• Proficiency with GitHub and CI/CD tooling (GitHub Actions and/or GitLab CI) to run tests as part of the pipeline.
• Experience with API testing (Postman or similar).
• Experience with bug tracking and test management tools (e.g. Jira, TestRail).
• Familiarity with AI-assisted development and testing, with practical use of AI tooling to improve the speed and quality of QA work.
• Proven ability to lead testing activities during sprint and release, and to mentor other QA engineers.
• Strong analytical and problem-solving skills, with a keen eye for identifying issues and inconsistencies.
• Strong communication and collaboration skills, with the ability to influence without direct authority.
• Ability to manage multiple tasks and priorities across teams in a fast-paced environment.

Nice to have

• A bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Technology or a related field.
• Experience stabilizing large end-to-end regression suites and driving down automation debt.
• Exposure to performance testing concepts and reliability engineering practices.
• Familiarity with basic SQL queries for database validation.
• Exposure to working with Python.

Details

• Hybrid working, with teams in the office around four days a week.
• Flexibility or accommodations can be discussed with the hiring team during the interview process.