Lead Test Automation Engineer
Why This Role Matters
At Finexus, we build the technology that powers Malaysia's banking and payments ecosystem. As a Lead Test Automation Engineer, you set the pace of release confidence and operational stability across every product in your department — coordinating quality outcomes at a scale no single product team can reach alone.
By building the automation for your department's products run on, defining the QA process that governs quality, and mentoring the next generation of QA engineers, you will drive measurable improvements in release velocity, defect escape rate, and delivery consistency across your department's portfolio.
About the Role
You will own the automation roadmap, QA process, and standards for the department, translating platform's org-wide standards and practices into department-level execution, and coordinate cross-product tradeoffs. You are accountable for automation across all products in the department, including those that support clients.
Beyond adapting automation framework for department- and product-specific implementation, you will contribute directly to framework and suite code, own design and architecture decisions. You hold technical decisions within the department: implementation approach, design reviews, and release gating criteria. Decisions on roadmap priority across products, headcount, and budget sit with the department director.
Mission / Expected Outcomes
- Own the department automation roadmap, prioritizing across products supporting deliveries to client and regulatory requirement within the framework platform sets
- Own the QA process for the department coverage strategy, test levels, product prioritization, and defect lifecycle and ensure test evidence and traceability stand up to regulatory and client-facing scrutiny.
- Contribute hands-on to framework implementation, high-impact suites, and hard debugging while retaining the technical depth to make and defend architecture decisions.
- Build and scale the TAE bench through mentoring, hiring involvement, and structured skill-gap closure.
- Represent test automation capability and risk posture to engineering and product leadership across the department.
Key Responsibilities
1. Department Roadmap Ownership & Standards
- Design and build department- and product-level automation implementation on top of platform framework contributing directly to, framework extensions and high-impact test suites.
- Own architecture and design decisions, including structure, reusability patterns, and test-data strategy; hold technical decisions on implementation approach.
- Own coverage strategy by setting the critical coverage floor for each product must meet and defining the trigger conditions for expanding coverage
- Own test case management standards across the department: library structure, execution records, and traceability from requirement through test case to execution result, so test evidence withstands regulatory and client scrutiny.
- Set test data and environment standards for the department, ensuring they are version-controlled, reproducible, and safe for parallel execution.
- Govern the defect lifecycle: triage discipline, severity and priority definitions, fix validation, and accountability for reopened defects.
- Lead resolution of complex technical problems related to flaky suites, environment instability, pipeline failures.
- Drive and coordinate the automation roadmap across all products in department scope, balancing short-term testing needs against long-term technical debt and strategic direction
- Uphold platform standards for coding conventions, documentation, and automation benchmarks; roll out its framework and tooling decisions for department context, and recommend new adoption where choices need to scale across products.
- Define and track department-level quality metrics such as defect escape rate, coverage, flake rate, execution cycle time, reporting automation and using it to drive process change.
2. Technical Leadership, Mentorship & Team Development
- Provide technical leadership across the automation team at the department level by mentoring engineers, reviewing automation code and design, and fostering a high-performance engineering culture across product teams.
- Act as technical approver on automation design and framework-extension proposals from product teams within the department.
- Identify formal training needs and coordinate upskilling paths for TAEs across products.
- Partner with Platform Tech leads to defining the department's automation tech stack direction.
- Own hiring involvement for TAE roles department-wide: interviews, take-home review calibration, and leveling decisions.
- Consult and advise on automation initiatives for any product in the department — reviewing compliance with QA Platform standards and flagging gaps for the product team to close.
- Champion continuous improvement and knowledge sharing at organization and department level.
Technical Scope
- Automation Tools: Playwright, Cypress, Katalon, Selenium, Appium, Postman, Karate or equivalent
- Programming: Java, JavaScript/TypeScript, Python, C, C#, or similar
- Testing Expertise: Strong depth in UI(Web/mobile) and API/backend automation, with other specialization security, performance
- QA Process: Test case management and defect tracking, coverage and traceability practice, and test evidence for audited environments
- Databases: Strong SQL for backend and transactional validation
- CI/CD: Bitbucket, Jenkins, GitLab CI, GitHub Actions, Azure DevOps or similar, with pipeline standards enforcement
- Domain Advantage: Fintech, banking, financial institutions, cards & payments, or regulated environments
- Familiarity with:
- Modern tech stacks and Agile methodologies
- SDLC, STLC, and software testing principles
- Automation frameworks, observability tools, and QA engineering best practices
Qualifications
Education & Experience
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Information Technology, or a related field
- 7+ years in Quality Assurance with at least 5 years in Test Automation or software engineering with a testing focus
- Proven ability to design and build automation frameworks for complex, large-scale systems, with current hands-on coding capability
- Proven track record leading automation roadmap and standards enforcement across more than one product or platform
- Experience defining QA process — coverage strategy, entry and exit criteria, defect governance — for more than one product or team
- Experience in fintech, banking, or payment technologies is a strong advantage
Professional Certifications (Optional)
- ISTQB-CTFL (Certified Tester Foundation Level)
- ISTQB-CT-TAE (Certified Tester Test Automation Engineer)
Competencies & Skills
- Proven ability to lead and manage a team of test automation engineers, including through indirect reporting lines
- Experience defining QA process – coverage strategy, automation governance, test case and defect management for more than one team
- Strong strategic thinking with demonstrated ability to align automation goals with business objectives across multiple products
- Experience leading automation roadmap against standards and processes at department scale across multiple products
- Ability to prioritize automation efforts across competing products based on ROI and risk
- Excellent communication and stakeholder management across engineering, product, and leadership
- High accountability, ownership, and results-driven attitude
