Lead Automation Tester - iOCO

Skills and Experience

We are seeking a highly experienced Lead Automation Tester to join our team in Sandton, Johannesburg. This is a hybrid role, offering a mix of remote and onsite work. The successful candidate will take a leadership role in shaping the automation testing landscape, leveraging over 8 years of experience in Automation Testing to ensure the delivery of high-quality software.

This role involves defining automation strategies, mentoring team members, and driving innovation in our testing processes.

What you’ll do:

• Lead Quality Engineering in squads by the agreed Test Engineering and Quality practices.
• Ensure alignment across stakeholders to optimize the testing efficiencies across the Product delivery stack.
• Ensure team effectiveness and healthy team dynamics.
• Liaise with Stakeholders.
• Deliver automated testing solutions. 
• Provide advice to clients on quality practices.
• Build and foster deep relationships with Peers, Subject Matter Experts, Developers, Product Owners, and other Stakeholders. 
• Work closely with Quality Assurance Leads, Practise Leads, Developers, Architects, Product owners, and other Stakeholders to meet the expectations of clients.

• Participate in the overall PI planning and the squad deliverables including capacity estimation and interdependencies.
• Obtain and review relevant artifacts from stakeholders (eg: technical landscape, architecture design, technology roadmaps).
• Create the Test Strategy, approach, or plan and ensure alignment with the squad objectives.
• Contribute to the systematic breakdown of the business needs into a manageable feature(s), stories, and epics that can be delivered.
• Ensure all committed user stories and acceptance criteria are tested for the specific release ensuring quality is not compromised.
• Participate in the backlog grooming and in the sprint planning.
• Participate in the daily stand-up where necessary, manage the issues raised by the Software Quality & Test Engineers, and raise relevant associated risks.
• Perform pull requests and ensure all feature branches are committed to Master.
• Review that the test automation solution meets the architectural and development standards that are reusable and scalable.
• Challenging the business and technology solutions in alignment with the client's value proposition.
• Ensure integration into and continuous test automation execution on DevOps pipelines.
• Work with the Enterprise Quality Assurance Practise Lead on the metrics and reporting to communicate quality engineering practices.
• Ensure the defect management process is adhered to by the Software Quality & Test Engineers.
• Ensure artifacts are easily obtainable by storing all relevant artifacts in the repository
• Participate in the retrospective reviews and seek efficiencies which will ensure quicker delivery with high quality to our client(s).
• Encourage Peer reviews of the QA artifacts.
• Seek ongoing improvements in technical capabilities.
• Mentor the Engineers within the team to improve their technical capabilities.
• Provide input into the documentation of standards & quality practices for Quality engineering for the organization's current and future technological architecture.
• Provide input into performance management of team members (e.g. performance contracts, development plans, poor performance and improvement plans, and review).
• Obtain buy-in for developing new and/or enhanced processes (e.g. operational processes) that will improve the functioning of stakeholders' businesses by highlighting benefits in support of the implementation of recommendations.
• Seek opportunities to improve business processes, models, and systems through agile thinking.

Other

Qualifications Required:

• Relevant IT/ Testing qualification
• ISTQB

Other information applicable to the opportunity:

• Initial 12-month contract
• Location: Johannesburg (Sandton) – hybrid way of work
• Level/ years of experience: Lead (8+ years experience)