Principal QA Automation Engineer, Team Lead

ABOUT ENGAGEWARE Engageware helps financial institutions and enterprises provide seamless, customer-centric experiences through an AI-powered platform offering appointment scheduling, virtual assistants, and customer engagement solutions. Our platform enhances digital and in-person interactions, streamlining customer journeys across multiple touchpoints. 🌎 Open to LATAM-based contractors in Spanish-speaking countries (Mexico, Argentina, Colombia, and others) | Bilingual: Spanish & English required ABOUT THE ROLE We're scaling our QA practice and need a leader who can build and guide a high-performing, distributed team while staying deeply technical and hands-on. As Principal QA Automation Engineer, Team Lead, you will serve as the central pillar of quality across all Engageware products — owning the automation strategy, standardizing engineering practices, and directly managing a team of QA automation engineers distributed across our product squads. You'll report directly to the VP of Engineering and play a strategic role in defining what "done" truly means across our engineering organization. From establishing automation standards and enforcing the Definition of Done, to building robust CI/CD pipelines and leveraging AI to accelerate testing, you will elevate quality at every level — and do it by example. This role is for a bilingual (Spanish/English) leader who is comfortable operating across cultures, product domains, and technical stacks. You will be hands-on in the code every day while simultaneously guiding your team's growth, coordinating with product squads, and reporting quality trends to engineering leadership. If you thrive on owning quality end-to-end, love building systems that scale, and want your leadership to have a measurable impact on everything engineering ships — this is the role for you. KEY RESPONSIBILITIES Team Leadership & People Management - Directly manage a distributed team of QA automation engineers — including hiring, onboarding, performance management, and career development. - Conduct regular 1:1s, set clear goals, provide ongoing feedback, and run performance reviews for all direct reports. - Partner with the VP of Engineering on team structure, headcount planning, and organizational design as the QA function grows. - Serve as the single point of accountability for quality standards across the entire engineering organization. - Define, document, and enforce Definition of Done criteria in collaboration with engineering and product leadership. - Drive adoption of shared testing standards, automation patterns, and tooling across all product squads. - Report on quality metrics, test coverage trends, defect patterns, and release readiness to the VP of Engineering. - Foster a culture of quality, ownership, and continuous improvement within the QA team and the broader engineering org. Hands-On Automation - Personally architect, build, and maintain automation frameworks for both UI and API testing across multiple product domains. - Implement Playwright as the primary E2E test framework, covering complex UI flows in Angular and React applications. - Build and maintain comprehensive API test suites covering REST, SOAP, and WSDL interfaces. - Write automation in multiple languages including Java and TypeScript/JavaScript, selecting the right tool for each context. - Leverage AI tooling (Claude and others) heavily — for test generation, coverage gap analysis, and reducing maintenance burden. - Build regression, smoke, and integration test suites that execute reliably within CI/CD pipelines on every deployment. CI/CD & DevOps Collaboration - Integrate and maintain automated test suites within our current Jenkins-based CI/CD pipelines, and help shape the path forward as we migrate to Bitbucket Pipelines and/or GitHub Actions. - Define environment promotion gating criteria and build release confidence signals (dashboards, alerts, readiness reports). - Integrate test results, coverage trends, and flakiness me…