Test Auotmation Engineer

The Test Automation Engineer is an automation-focused quality engineering role supporting the Unified Digital Platform (UDP) project. This role is API-first and service-layer heavy, responsible for designing, developing, and maintaining automated testing across APIs, services, integrations, and critical end-to-end workflows. The emphasis is on validating APIs for both functional behavior and non-functional requirements such as performance, load, scalability, reliability, and error handling.

You’ll partner closely with software engineers, architects, product owners, and QA stakeholders to define and execute an API-first quality strategy, integrate automation into CI/CD pipelines, surface quality risks early, and provide clear evidence of release readiness. The role should be comfortable working primarily at the service layer, using targeted UI automation only where it adds meaningful business coverage., * Design, develop, and maintain automated tests for RESTful APIs, backend services, integrations, and critical end-to-end business workflows

• Validate API functionality, including request/response payloads, status codes, schemas, authentication/authorization behavior, business rules, data integrity, error handling, idempotency, and negative scenarios
• Design and execute API performance and load tests covering response time, throughput, concurrency, sustained load, spike behavior, stress limits, and recovery characteristics
• Partner with architects, engineers, and product owners to translate functional and non-functional requirements into measurable test scenarios, acceptance criteria, workload models, and quality gates
• Create and maintain reusable automation frameworks, API clients, test utilities, test data strategies, mocks, stubs, and service virtualization where appropriate
• Automate integration, regression, smoke, and release-readiness suites, prioritizing service-level coverage and adding UI automation for critical user journeys when needed
• Integrate automated functional and performance tests into CI/CD pipelines to provide fast feedback and prevent regressions from progressing through the delivery lifecycle
• Analyze test results, logs, traces, and service metrics to isolate defects, performance bottlenecks, reliability issues, and environment or test-data problems
• Produce concise test reports and dashboards that communicate coverage, defects, performance findings, trends, risks, and release recommendations
• Collaborate with developers to improve testability, promote shift-left quality practices, and address defects at the earliest practical stage
• Use Jira (or equivalent) for defect management, sprint tracking, test coverage visibility, and release-readiness reporting
• Support exploratory testing, targeted manual validation, UAT support, and production verification when automation is not practical or business judgment is required
• Participate in sprint planning, backlog refinement, daily standups, retrospectives, architecture/design reviews, and release activities
• Perform other duties as assigned, * Automated API coverage is established for critical functional, integration, regression, and negative scenarios
• Performance and load tests reflect agreed business workloads and non-functional requirements
• Automated tests run reliably in CI/CD and provide actionable feedback to engineering teams
• Quality risks, defects, bottlenecks, and release-readiness concerns are identified early and communicated clearly
• Automation assets are reusable, maintainable, documented, and owned as part of the product delivery lifecycle

• Strong hands-on experience developing API and service-level test automation for distributed applications and integration workflows
• Demonstrated ability to test APIs functionally, including positive, negative, boundary, schema, security, data, and error-handling scenarios
• Demonstrated experience designing and executing non-functional API tests for performance, load, stress, spike, endurance/soak, scalability, and reliability
• Proficiency with API testing tools/libraries such as Postman/Newman, REST Assured, Playwright API testing, Karate, Pact, or equivalent
• Proficiency with performance/load testing tools such as k6, JMeter, Gatling, Locust, or equivalent
• Ability to define realistic workload models, establish/validate performance thresholds, interpret results, and communicate bottlenecks and risks
• Experience integrating automated tests into CI/CD pipelines and publishing actionable test results and quality gates
• Experience with source control, Git-based workflows, code reviews, and maintaining automation as production-quality code
• Working knowledge of HTTP/HTTPS, REST, JSON, API authentication patterns, asynchronous processing, database validation, and common integration patterns
• Experience with at least one automation language such as Java, JavaScript/TypeScript, C#, or Python
• Strong understanding of Agile/Scrum delivery, defect lifecycle management, test strategy, risk-based testing, and release readiness
• Ability to work independently in a distributed team, take ownership of outcomes, and communicate proactively across technical and non-technical stakeholders, * Experience creating an enterprise-grade automation framework or test architecture for API-centric platforms
• Experience with contract testing / consumer-driven contracts (e.g., Pact or equivalent)
• Experience testing event-driven, message-based, or asynchronous integrations
• Experience using observability platforms (logs, metrics, distributed tracing) to support analysis and defect isolation
• Experience with containerized test execution and cloud-based development or test environments
• Experience with service virtualization, mocks/stubs, synthetic test data, and test-environment dependency management
• Experience testing security-related API behaviors and awareness of common API vulnerabilities
• Experience supporting large-scale retail, eCommerce, digital platform, or enterprise integration initiatives
• Experience with UI automation frameworks such as Playwright, Cypress, or Selenium for critical end-to-end workflows
• Bilingual Spanish and English language skills are a plus