Senior QA Automation Engineer

FreeBalance is a purpose-led global technology company empowering governments to achieve transparent, accountable, and effective public financial management through its proprietary FreeBalance Accountability Suite™, a comprehensive Government Resource Planning (GRP) solution designed exclusively for the public sector. With over 40 years of experience supporting governments worldwide, FreeBalance drives digital transformation across the entire budget cycle - from policy-based budgeting and accounting to human resource management, performance measurement, treasury, and revenue management - all within a scalable, unified platform that supports fiscal transparency, citizen engagement, and data-driven decision-making. As a Senior Manual QA Engineer, you will join a newly established Quality Assurance team responsible for ensuring the reliability, accuracy, and integrity of the FreeBalance Accountability Suite™ across its 20+ functional modules used by national governments worldwide. 

 

As a Senior QA Automation Engineer, you will serve as the technical lead for test automation at FreeBalance, responsible for architecting, building, and maintaining automated test suites across UI, API, and integration layers of the GRP platform. You will work closely with the QA Lead, Manual QA Engineers, and Development teams to translate manual test coverage into reliable, maintainable automation assets. This role requires deep hands-on expertise in Java-based automation with Playwright for UI testing and REST Assured for API validation. You will establish automation standards, define the framework architecture, integrate tests into Jenkins CI pipelines, and progressively expand automated coverage across 20+ GRP modules. The ideal candidate combines strong engineering discipline with a pragmatic approach to automation strategy - knowing when to automate, what to automate first, and how to build frameworks that remain maintainable as the product evolves. You thrive in environments where the automation practice does not yet exist and where foundational decisions have long-term impact. This role reports to the QA Lead and collaborates daily with Manual QA Engineers, Development team leads, and the DevOps/Infrastructure team

● Design, build, and maintain a scalable Java-based test automation framework using Playwright for UI and REST Assured for API testing.

● Establish framework architecture decisions: project structure, base classes, page object model, test data management, reporting, self-healing and retry logic.

● Define and enforce automation coding standards, naming conventions, and documentation practices.

● Build reusable utility libraries for common actions: authentication flows, environment configuration, database queries, and assertion helpers.

● Ensure framework supports parallel execution, cross-environment configuration, and CI/CD integration from day one. 

 

● Implement end-to-end UI test suites covering critical GRP workflows: budget execution, expenditure processing, treasury payments, and revenue collection.

● Apply Page Object Model (POM) pattern to ensure test maintainability as the UI evolves.

● Handle complex JSF-based UI interactions including dynamic forms, multi-step workflows, modals, and data grids.

● Build smoke and regression suites that can be triggered automatically on each build artifact.

● Manage test data setup and teardown strategies to ensure test isolation and repeatability.

 

● Design and implement comprehensive REST API test suites covering GRP service endpoints across all functional modules.

● Validate API contracts: request/response schema, status codes, error handling, authentication, and data integrity.

● Build data-driven API tests that cover boundary conditions, negative scenarios, and multi-step transactional flows.

● Integrate API tests as a fast-feedback layer in the CI pipeline, running on every Trunk commit independently of UI tests.

● Collaborate with back-end developers to define testable API contracts and flag integration issues early.

 

● Integrate automated test suites into the existing Jenkins CI pipeline, triggering appropriate test layers on each build.

● Configure test execution stages: smoke on commit, regression on Code Freeze, full suite on release candidate.

● Implement test reporting and failure notification so the team receives actionable feedback without manual monitoring.

● Work with the DevOps team to manage test environment provisioning and ensure automation runs reliably across environments.

● Maintain pipeline stability: monitor flaky tests, enforce quarantine processes, and drive flakiness reduction. 

 

● Collaborate with the QA Lead and Manual QA Engineers to identify and prioritize automation candidates based on risk, frequency, and regression value.

● Build and maintain an automation coverage map showing which manual test cases have been automated, which are in progress, and which remain manual.

● Define and track key automation metrics: coverage percentage, execution time, pass rate, and flakiness rate by module.

● Contribute to shift-left testing practices by enabling developers to run smoke suites locally before committing.

 

● Partner with Manual QA Engineers to convert high-value regression test cases into automated equivalents.

● Work with Functional Analysts to understand business workflows deeply enough to write reliable automation for complex multi-module flows.

● Participate in sprint planning and backlog refinement, estimating automation effort and flagging testability concerns during requirements review.

● Support developers in understanding test failures and distinguishing automation issues from genuine application defects 

 

● Mentor Manual QA Engineers interested in developing automation skills.

● Conduct code reviews on automation contributions from other team members.

● Continuously evaluate new tools, libraries, and practices that can improve framework efficiency or coverage quality.

● Document framework onboarding guides to enable team members to contribute automation without deep framework expertise. 

 

● Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Information Technology, or a related discipline. Equivalent practical experience considered.

● Minimum 8+ years of progressive experience in QA automation for enterprise-scale web applications.

● Proven experience designing and building automation frameworks from scratch, not just maintaining existing ones.

● Demonstrated experience with Java as the primary automation language in a professional setting.

● Experience integrating automated test suites into CI/CD pipelines (Jenkins, GitHub Actions, or equivalent).

● Background in or strong understanding of manual QA practices, as automation engineers who have done manual testing make better architectural decisions. 

● Advanced expertise in:

    ○ Java - primary automation language

    ○ Playwright - UI end-to-end automation

    ○ REST Assured - API test automation and contract validation

    ○ Jenkins - CI/CD test execution in automated pipeline or by demand ○ Docker -      for effective tests isolation and debugging

    ○ TestNG / JUnit - test execution framework

    ○ Maven / Gradle - build and dependency management

    ○ Git - version control and branching

● Strong understanding of asynchronous UI behavior, waiting strategies, and DOM interaction in Playwright.

● Experience writing data-driven tests using external data sources (CSV, JSON, Excel, database).

● Proficiency with SQL for test data setup, teardown, and result verification against the database layer.

● Experience with Docker or containerized test execution environments. 

 

● Hands-on experience configuring Jenkins pipelines (Jenkinsfile) to trigger, execute, and report automated tests.

● Experience managing test environment configuration across multiple stages (dev, staging, UAT, production-like).

● Understanding of build artifact versioning and the ability to run tests against a specific revision or tagged build.

● Familiarity with Docker Compose for spinning up test environments on demand. 

 

● Deep understanding of automation pyramid: unit, integration, API, and UI layers and when to invest in each.

● Experience implementing flaky test detection, quarantine, and elimination workflows.

● Proficiency in test isolation techniques: independent test data, environment cleanup, and idempotent test design.

● Familiarity with contract testing concepts (e.g., Pact) and API schema validation strategies.

● Understanding of performance baseline testing and ability to integrate basic load assertions into API test suites.

 

● Ability to automate complex multi-step workflows in JSF-based or form-heavy enterprise web applications.

● Experience testing applications backed by multiple database platforms (MySQL, Oracle, MSSQL).

● Understanding of ERP, GRP, or financial management system workflows is a strong advantage.

● Familiarity with government or public sector software context is a plus. 

 

● Strong analytical problem-solving skills with attention to framework maintainability and long-term testability.

● Demonstrated ability to work autonomously on ambiguous problems where the solution is not predefined.

● Experience mentoring engineers and promoting automation best practices across a QA team.

● Ability to work effectively across distributed, multicultural, and global teams.

 

● Organized and capable of managing parallel workstreams: framework development, active sprint automation, and pipeline maintenance.

● Ability to work effectively in a distributed, multicultural, and global environment.

● Excellent written and verbal English communication skills. 

 

● Experience automating ERP, GRP, IFMIS, or other large-scale government financial management systems.

● Hands-on experience with Playwright Java bindings specifically.

● Experience with micro-service or modular application architectures and testing inter-service API flows.

● Familiarity with contract testing frameworks such as Pact.

● Experience with performance or load testing tools (Gatling, k6, JMeter) as a complement to functional automation.

● Familiarity with SVN or Subversion-based workflows in addition to Git.

● Experience with Testomat.io or similar test management platforms for linking automated tests to test cases.

● Familiarity with AI-assisted test generation tools and their practical limitations. ●Portfolio or GitHub repository demonstrating automation framework design, REST Assured usage, and Playwright implementation 

FreeBalance solutions manage real national budgets, government payroll, and public procurement for over 25 countries. Every release carries direct risk to sovereign financial operations. Automated test coverage is not a productivity optimization—it is a reliability guarantee for systems governments cannot afford to have fail. The QA automation practice at FreeBalance is being built from scratch. The engineer in this role will make the foundational decisions that determine how the team tests for the next decade: which framework patterns to adopt, which layers to prioritize, and how to integrate quality gates into a delivery pipeline that today has no automated verification beyond unit tests. As a Senior QA Automation Engineer, you will directly reduce the risk of regressions reaching production, compress release cycle feedback loops, and free Manual QA Engineers to focus on exploratory and high-judgment testing where human insight matters most. Your architecture decisions will scale with a QA team growing to 6+ engineers across three global hubs.