What are the responsibilities and job description for the QE Proactive Hiring: Senior Automation SDET Leader (NYC) position at Ness Digital Engineering?
The Senior Automation SDET Leader is responsible for leading a high-throughput, customer-centric automation delivery team that directly supports delivery stabilization, regression closure, and trust-critical coverage gaps. This leader will manage a team of 10-15 engineers operating as an “Automation Factory.” Additionally, this role serves as the single point of contact for both Automation and Performance Engineering needs within the assigned ARTs, ensuring a holistic approach to quality and system performance.
This role exists to industrialize automation execution—efficiently, repeatably, and at scale—under clear architectural and governance direction.
What This Role Delivers
- Rapid build-out of automated regression and trust-critical test coverage.
- Automation aligned to real analyst workflows, not test case volume.
- Consistent, repeatable automation patterns across delivery teams.
- Reduced manual regression load during stabilization phases.
- Inputs into future-state QE 2.0 intelligence and learning loops.
- Coordination of Performance Engineering efforts, including test planning, execution, and reporting.
Core Responsibilities
- Team Leadership: Lead, mentor, and develop a team of 10-15 Automation SDETs, fostering a collaborative and high-performing environment.
- Delivery Management: Oversee the execution of the automation backlog, prioritized by QE 1.0 and delivery leadership, ensuring timely and high-quality delivery.
- Automation Strategy (Execution): Ensure automation efforts focus on: regression risk, customer- and analyst-visible workflows, and trust-breaking/high-impact failure scenarios.
- Collaboration: Collaborate closely with ART-aligned QE leads and development teams to integrate automation seamlessly into the SDLC.
- Quality & Reliability: Ensure automation is reliable, maintainable, and production-relevant, adhering to defined patterns and standards.
- Telemetry & Reporting: Contribute execution telemetry (coverage, failure patterns, flakiness) into QE reporting mechanisms, providing insights for continuous improvement.
- Capacity Management: Rapidly scale team effort up or down based on release and delivery demand.
- Process Improvement: Identify and implement improvements to automation processes, tools, and techniques.
- Governance & Standards: Enforce adherence to established automation standards and governance policies.
Operating Model
- Operate within a Factory execution model, managing a centralized team delivering automation services.
- Work is centrally governed but locally executed, coordinating with ART-level QE leads.
- Priorities and standards are owned by QE 1.0 and, in the future, QE 2.0 leadership.
Skills & Experience
- Leadership: Proven experience leading and managing a team of automation and performance testing engineers.
- Technical Expertise: Strong hands-on experience with test automation and performance frameworks (e.g., Selenium, Appium, Cypress, Jmeter, Loadrunner, Tosca) and CI/CD integration (e.g., Jenkins, Azure DevOps, GitLab CI).
- Automation Proficiency: Ability to automate at API, service, and workflow (UI) layers as needed.
- Delivery Experience: Experience working in high-pressure delivery environments.
- Collaboration: Strong collaboration skills with developers, QE leads, and other stakeholders.
- Governance & Standards: Discipline in following standards, patterns, and governance.
- Problem Solving: Excellent analytical and problem-solving skills.
- Communication: Excellent written and verbal communication skills.