QA Automation Leader PJ/MEI NOVO

We’re looking for a Senior QA Automation Leader to join our team on a complex enterprise platform engagement with one of our partners. This role is focused on defining, standardizing, and driving the automation strategy for what it means for an environment to be QA-certified across a large distributed platform.

The customer’s platform is made up of dozens of services owned by many engineering teams. Integration-style and acceptance tests already exist in parts of the system, but the current process is fragmented, inconsistent, and heavily dependent on manual coordination. The goal is to move toward a clear, repeatable certification process where teams can understand what must pass, what evidence is required, and how automated test execution should validate a newly built environment.

This is a senior technical leadership role for someone who can operate at the intersection of QA architecture, test automation, platform engineering, engineering coordination, and delivery reliability. Success here depends on being able to bring structure to ambiguity, define a practical testing standard, understand existing automation across multiple services, and help teams converge around a shared certification bar.

Who You Are

• A senior QA automation leader, test architect, or quality engineering leader with experience defining testing standards for complex distributed systems.
• Experienced working with large platforms made up of many services, teams, dependencies, and release paths.
• Comfortable understanding existing test automation, identifying gaps, and defining what “good enough to certify” means in a practical delivery environment.
• Strong with automated acceptance testing, integration testing, service-level validation, test orchestration, and CI/CD-based test execution.
• Able to work across Java, Python, Jenkins, custom test harnesses, APIs, services, and existing QA frameworks, even when the current state is inconsistent or under-documented.
• Experienced turning fragmented QA practices into clear standards, templates, evidence requirements, and repeatable certification workflows.
• Comfortable partnering with engineering teams, QA teams, infrastructure teams, and leadership to define requirements and drive adoption.
• Pragmatic about automation: you know when to standardize, when to adapt to legacy constraints, and when to focus on the highest-risk gaps first.
• Able to lead without needing everything to be perfectly defined upfront.
• A strong communicator who can explain quality gates, testing gaps, risks, tradeoffs, and next steps to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.

What You’ll Do

QA Certification Standard

• Define the written standard for what it means for an environment to be QA-certified.
• Create a clear pass/fail bar for environment certification across services, integrations, and platform-level workflows.
• Define what integration coverage means across a distributed service architecture.
• Create templates for required evidence, test results, service readiness, coverage expectations, and sign-off.
• Clarify terminology, ownership, and expectations so engineering, QA, and leadership teams are aligned.

Test Automation Strategy

• Assess the current automated acceptance and integration testing landscape across dozens of services.
• Identify which services already have sufficient automated coverage and which services have gaps.
• Understand existing test harnesses, Jenkins orchestration, service-level acceptance tests, and team-specific testing approaches.
• Define how automated tests should be triggered, monitored, reported, and used as certification evidence.
• Help design a path toward running acceptance and integration tests in a more centralized, repeatable, and reliable way.
• Work with engineering teams to determine how missing or legacy test automation should be addressed.

Cross-Service Integration Validation

• Define how test tenants, test data, and end-to-end flows should be exercised during certification.
• Ensure the certification process validates not only individual services, but also meaningful cross-service behavior.
• Create or guide coverage matrix templates that show which services, workflows, tenants, and integrations are tested.
• Help identify high-risk integration points and prioritize automation work accordingly.
• Partner with service teams to confirm dependencies, expected behaviors, failure modes, and validation criteria.

Quality Leadership & Technical Coordination

• Serve as the technical owner for the QA certification standard.
• Work closely with QA, engineering, infrastructure, and delivery stakeholders to drive agreement on the certification approach.
• Help teams understand what artifacts they need to provide and what evidence is required for sign-off.
• Lead technical discussions around testing gaps, automation feasibility, and certification risk.
• Support cross-team adoption of the standard without turning the process into unnecessary bureaucracy.
• Help create a practical path from fragmented testing practices to a unified certification program.

Delivery Reliability & Documentation

• Create clear documentation for QA certification workflows, required artifacts, evidence templates, coverage expectations, and escalation paths.
• Define how missed testing windows, incomplete coverage, or failed certification checks should be handled.
• Help build the foundation for compliance tracking across services and teams.
• Support leadership sign-off by making risks, gaps, and readiness visible.
• Contribute to a repeatable process that reduces manual coordination and gives stakeholders confidence in platform readiness.

Preferred Qualifications

• 7+ years of experience in QA automation, quality engineering, test architecture, SDET leadership, or similar roles.
• Strong experience defining QA automation strategy for complex software platforms.
• Experience working with distributed systems, microservices, service-oriented architectures, or large enterprise platforms.
• Hands-on experience with automated acceptance testing, integration testing, API testing, and CI/CD test execution.
• Experience with Java and/or Python-based test automation environments.
• Experience with Jenkins or similar CI/CD orchestration tools.
• Experience working with custom test harnesses, legacy test frameworks, or mixed testing stacks.
• Experience creating test coverage matrices, evidence templates, quality gates, and release certification criteria.
• Experience working across many engineering teams and aligning different groups around a shared standard.
• Experience with enterprise delivery, platform certification, SAP-adjacent delivery, or large-scale environment validation is a plus.
• Experience leading QA transformation, test standardization, or automation maturity initiatives is a strong plus.

Soft Skills

• Strong ownership and ability to drive clarity in ambiguous environments.
• Excellent communication and stakeholder management skills.
• Comfortable influencing teams without relying only on formal authority.
• Able to balance technical depth with practical delivery pressure.
• Strong systems thinking and ability to reason across many services and dependencies.
• Calm, structured, and pragmatic when dealing with fragmented processes.
• Comfortable working with engineering teams that have different levels of QA maturity.
• Able to identify risks early and communicate them clearly.
• Strong documentation habits and attention to operational detail.
• Bias toward repeatable, usable processes over theoretical perfection.

Why This Role

This role is ideal for someone who enjoys bringing order to complex QA environments. You should be excited by the challenge of taking a fragmented, manually coordinated certification process and turning it into a clear, automated, evidence-backed standard that many teams can follow.

If you’re excited by QA architecture, test automation strategy, distributed systems validation, and helping engineering teams ship with more confidence, we’d love to hear from you. ;