Lead Automation Test Engineer
Contract Lead Automation Test Engineer – Financial Services
Location: Sheffield (Hybrid – 3 days on-site)
Duration: 12-month initial contract
IR35 Status: Inside IR35
We are recruiting for an experienced Lead Automation Test Engineer to join a major financial services client in Sheffield. This role will lead automation strategy, test delivery, and quality engineering across a high-profile programme. You will provide technical leadership to the test engineering team, define best practices, and drive high-quality automated solutions across complex cloud and on-prem environments.
Key Responsibilities
- Lead and mentor automation engineers, providing technical guidance, coaching, and oversight of automation activities.
- Develop, execute, and maintain automated test frameworks and scripts for web, API, database, and cloud-based applications.
- Create comprehensive test plans, test cases, test scenarios, test data, and associated documentation based on requirements and specifications.
- Select and recommend appropriate automation tools based on system architecture and project requirements.
- Define performance test strategies, covering scope, environments, risks, and resource planning.
- Integrate automated testing into CI/CD pipelines (GitLab/Jenkins) and support shift-left testing practices.
- Lead and coordinate SIT/OAT/UAT testing activities with technical and business stakeholders.
- Analyse design documents for testability and ensure requirements traceability across test assets.
- Accurately log, track, and report defects, attend triage sessions, and verify fixes.
- Provide continuous improvement recommendations across test processes, tooling, and automation capability.
- Stay current with emerging technologies and adapt automation approaches to evolving project needs.
Essential Skills & Experience
- Strong background in automation testing within financial services or complex enterprise environments.
- Proven experience developing automated test scripts with JavaScript .
- Hands-on experience with automation tools such as Selenium WebDriver IO (WDIO), Cucumber, Selenium UI , and RestAssured for API testing.
- Strong manual testing experience alongside automation capability.
- Experience with cloud testing across AWS, Azure, GCP or similar platforms.
- Skilled in Jenkins pipeline creation , CI/CD integration, and automated reporting.
- Web UI testing and database comparison testing expertise.
- Experience with JIRA , Xephyr , and broader test management tools.
- API Testing, API Gateway testing, Batch/ETL testing.
- Experience with GitOps repositories and modern DevOps workflows.
- Excellent stakeholder engagement and communication skills, with the ability to lead and influence.
- Experience working in Agile and Waterfall delivery environments.
Desirable Experience
- Exposure to Identity & Access Management (IAM) programmes.
- Experience with SailPoint IdentityIQ , identity warehousing, SCIM, REST API, LDAP, OIDC, CSV ingestion.
- Testing experience with Graph Database Management Systems (GDBMS) .
- Experience with ServiceNow , Active Directory, AWS/Azure integrations.
- Testing “functions and decision points as code,” such as Policy-as-Code.
- Pub/Sub and MQ systems testing.
- GCP cloud testing methodologies.
- SaaS platform testing.
- Process improvement leadership – establishing performance testing standards and governance.
- Skill sets across languages such as: Java, Cypher, Python, JavaScript, PHP, .NET, Go , SQL Server, MySQL.
- Experience with test tools such as QMetry , TestRail , Postman , Insomnia .
- BDD/TDD experience.