Test Automation Lead

Symetra’s Individual Life Division (ILD) is seeking a full-time Test Automation Lead. This is a hands-on, division-level technical leadership role responsible for establishing and driving a unified test automation strategy across ILD delivery teams — owning framework standards, mentoring, and hands-on implementation.

 

As a technical leader, you will partner with engineers, product owners, QA teams, delivery leads, and stakeholders across ILD and Symetra to champion quality throughout the development lifecycle. You will provide technical leadership that fosters a quality-first mindset and builds consistent automation practices across delivery teams, advancing Symetra’s shift-left, automation-first Quality Engineering model in which quality is built into the development process.

 

The successful candidate will translate a quality-first vision into standardized practice, ultimately improving customer and partner experiences and delivering greater predictability in ILD’s speed to market.

 

Responsibilities

• Define and drive a unified test automation strategy across ILD delivery teams, standardizing secure, scalable tools and frameworks and driving continuous improvement of testing strategies, frameworks, and tools.
• Utilize Symetra-approved tools and technology for quality engineering purposes for the following:
• Partner with engineering and DevOps on CI/CD pipelines as code (YAML) in Azure DevOps, defining the automated test execution those pipelines must include.
• Define the automated quality gates and validation standards for Azure DevOps pipelines — including test execution on pull requests and the criteria for promotion — and partner with engineering and DevOps to implement them and apply release controls.
• Set the standards for extending quality into production through observability — including synthetic and health-check testing of critical paths — and partner with operations and engineering on monitoring, alerting, and incident feedback loops that continuously improve test coverage.
• Develop and maintain comprehensive automated tests spanning integration, UI, end-to-end, performance, and security testing that increase coverage and improve the efficiency and reliability of testing cycles.
• Provide technical direction and mentorship to Software Test Engineers (STEs), SDETs, and delivery-team engineers across ILD delivery teams, leading through influence rather than a direct reporting line and fostering a quality-first mindset.
• Define and track meaningful automation metrics, including coverage, execution results, stability, failure trends, and test effectiveness.
• Lead root-cause analysis for complex automation failures, framework issues, and recurring defects, and implement improvements to prevent recurrence.
• Present and share cloud-based solutions with internal engineering communities for feedback and review.
• Collaborate effectively in a remote team environment using tools such as Microsoft Teams.

Required Technical Skills:

• Demonstrated experience defining and implementing an enterprise or cross-team test automation strategy, including standardizing tools and frameworks across multiple delivery teams, mentoring engineers, and influencing delivery teams without direct authority.
• Strong understanding of QA best practices, including shift-left testing, defect triage, and quality metrics, with the ability to use metrics both to drive test coverage, efficiency, and reliability improvements and to communicate automation health and delivery risk to engineering leadership and stakeholders.
• Experience delivering in Scrum environments.
• Experience testing AWS-based applications, including serverless or container-based solutions.
• Hands-on experience building UI and end-to-end test automation with a modern framework such as Playwright and Selenium.
• Strong experience designing and governing scalable automation frameworks, including coding standards, test strategy, framework architecture, and long-term maintainability.
• Strong DevOps mindset, with demonstrated success integrating automated testing into CI/CD pipelines using Azure DevOps, GitHub Actions, or comparable tooling, and measurably improving automation stability, coverage, and maintainability over time.
• Experience testing APIs and web services using REST, JSON, and XML with tools such as Postman.
• Experience creating and maintaining test artifacts (test plans, test cases, test strategies), defining testing standards across teams, and keeping artifacts and results traceable in Symetra-approved tools to support compliance and audit expectations.
• Familiarity with security testing and vulnerability scanning as part of the delivery pipeline.
• Experience contributing to new solution design and architecture.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Experience with SpiraTest or a comparable test case management platform for test artifacts and traceability.
• Experience with AI-assisted testing implementation.
• Experience with observability tools such as Datadog or Application Insights.
• Experience with performance and load testing, including defining performance baselines and validating scalability under expected and peak load.
• Experience in insurance or another regulated financial services environment.

Soft Skills:

• Proven ability to lead and influence across teams, with strong verbal and written communication skills for aligning engineers, stakeholders, and non-technical audiences around a common quality-first vision.
• Collaborative and adaptable, with a proactive mindset in a fast-moving environment.
• Strong problem-solving and critical-thinking skills, paired with a continuous-learning growth mindset.

Education:

• College degree or equivalent relevant work experience.

Typical Experience:

• Eight to ten years of cumulative, relevant automation engineering and quality engineering experience.