Principal QA Automation Engineer, Team Lead

ABOUT ENGAGEWARE Vantage Compute 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 Vantage Compute 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 metrics into observability tooling. Partner with DevOps to ensure test infrastructure evolves with the team and scales through the pipeline migration. Coverage & Cross-Squad Collaboration Oversee quality for all Vantage Compute products: Aivo suite (Virtual Assistant, Live Chat, AgentBot, Studio) and Appointment Scheduling. Collaborate with product managers and engineers to define acceptance criteria and testability requirements per squad. Execute and evolve functional, regression, integration, and end-to-end test strategies. Identify, document, and track defects in Jira; surface defect patterns and root-cause prevention strategies to engineering leadership. TECHNICAL REQUIREMENTS Required Proven hands-on expertise with Playwright for modern end-to-end UI and API test automation at scale. Strong proficiency in TypeScript/JavaScript and Java for test framework development. Experience testing Angular and React frontend applications. Deep experience with API testing — REST, SOAP, and WSDL interfaces. Experience architecting test