Lead Automation Engineer (copy) At Distro

As Lead Automation Engineer you own the automation strategy and the frameworks that implement it.

You will design and build scalable, reusable automation in Playwright and Cypress with JavaScript, across web and API surfaces, and integrate it into CI/CD so that it actually gates releases rather than producing reports nobody reads.

You will set automation standards and best practice across teams, review other engineers' automation code, and mentor QA engineers into stronger automation practice.

You will also lead our use of AI tooling in testing, test generation, maintenance, failure triage, and coverage analysis, which is genuinely open territory here rather than a solved problem you inherit.

You will work directly with developers, product managers, and QA engineers to define test strategy and acceptance criteria, analyze results, and drive root causes to resolution.

You will need:

• Substantial hands-on Playwright and Cypress experience, built in JavaScript or TypeScript
• Strong JavaScript engineering, you write real code, not just test scripts
• Demonstrated framework ownership: structure, reusability, test data strategy, parallelization, reporting, flakiness control
• CI/CD integration so automation gates releases; Git
• REST API testing, SQL, and test data management
• Practical use of AI tooling in a testing workflow
• Lead scope: setting standards, reviewing others' code, mentoring engineers
• Agile or Scrum delivery