Lead Automation SDET

Job Purpose

Responsible to lead a pod of QA automation engineers delivering automated coverage and quality gates across ISA’s Reservation, Flight Operations, Cargo, and supporting systems. Owns the pod’s automation strategy, framework adherence, flake management, and release assurance outcomes. Ensures the pod operates as a shift-left partner to delivery squads and that quality results are predictable, measurable, and aligned with ISA engineering priorities.

Automation Strategy & Framework

• Define the pod’s automation roadmap, coverage priorities, and reliability targets.
• Govern framework standards, reusable assets, and automation tooling within the pod.
• Own flake and reliability outcomes across the pod’s test portfolio.

Quality Gates & Release Assurance

• Ensure quality gates are correctly designed, enforced, and monitored across pod-owned pipelines.
• Review release readiness and go/no-go quality signals for the pod’s squads.
• Drive shift-left practices including contract testing and component testing at squad level.

Stakeholder Engagement

• Act as the quality counterpart for Engineering Managers, Tech Leads, and Product Management for the pod’s squads.
• Translate automation and quality data into clear, actionable decisions for stakeholders.
• Coordinate with DevOps, Operations, and vendor teams on end-to-end quality.

Leadership

• Own hiring, onboarding, and performance of the SDETs in the pod.
• Define career growth plans and coaching pathways aligned to FLIGHT.

People Management

• Provides direction, coaching and guidance to team members for their career and professional development.
• Creates a conducive working environment to build and sustain a performance driven, engaged, and committed team.
• Ensures people management responsibilities are handled effectively in line with company procedures.

Qualifications (Academic, training, languages)

• Bachelor’s or master’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or related field.
• Fluent in English Language
• Expert in modern test automation frameworks (Selenium, Playwright, Cypress, RestAssured, or equivalent).
• Strong working knowledge of CI/CD pipelines and quality gate design (Azure DevOps, Jenkins, GitHub Actions).
• Solid understanding of software architecture, APIs, and distributed systems.
• Working knowledge of observability tools (Datadog, Dynatrace, or equivalent).
• Skilled at reading telemetry, flake data, and defect trends to prioritize work.
• Strong people-leadership, coaching, and stakeholder-management skills.
• Demonstrates consistent delivery against pod KPIs and strategic goals.
• Proficient in one programming language used for automation (Java, C#, Python, or JavaScript/TypeScript).

Work Experience

• With 8-10 years of experience in software quality engineering with at least 3 years leading or mentoring QA engineers.
• Travel, airline, or transactional/e-commerce platform experience is preferred.
• Experience with performance testing, load testing, and non-functional quality assessment.