Automation Engineer

Who you are

• You might demonstrate the capabilities below through any combination of relevant professional experience, or a transition from a manual QA background
• Experience writing and maintaining automated tests with Playwright (or a comparable framework such as Cypress, Selenium, or WebdriverIO)
• Working proficiency in JavaScript/TypeScript or Python
• Hands-on manual QA experience including functional, regression, exploratory, and/or black-box testing
• Comfort working in Git/GitHub and collaborating through pull requests and code review
• Familiarity with Jira/Confluence-based Scrum workflows
• Strong communication skills. You can clearly represent the state of testing to both engineers and non-technical stakeholders
• A collaborative mindset: this role sits at the intersection of a team, the Quality Guild, and the central Automation team, and success depends on strong relationships across all three
• Experience with CI/CD pipelines (we use Concourse) and integrating automated tests into them
• Experience with TestRail or similar test-management/reporting integrations
• Experience with backend testing against a Django/Python monolith or Go/Kotlin services
• Interest in AI-assisted testing tooling (e.g., self-healing tests, LLM-assisted authoring)
• Prior experience as a QA Analyst or SDET

What the job involves

• SpotHero is seeking an Automation Engineer to join one of our engineering teams within the Quality Guild
• This role blends hands-on manual testing with the writing and long-term maintenance of automated test suites, working shoulder-to-shoulder with backend, frontend, and mobile engineers to keep our releases fast and reliable as SpotHero scales
• As an Automation Engineer, you'll be embedded in a team, participating in all of its ceremonies and reporting into that teams’ structure, while also staying closely connected to our central Automation team and the broader Quality Guild
• You'll split your time between manual testing and building/maintaining automated coverage
• Own and maintain all automated tests belonging to your team, keeping them consistently green and remediating failures quickly in collaboration with team members
• Identify automation opportunities as new functionality ships, and write new end-to-end and integration tests in Playwright to cover it
• Perform manual QA testing alongside automation work; exploratory testing, edge-case discovery, and release validation with backend and frontend engineers
• Represent automation work as planned work in Jira/Scrum, keeping it visible alongside the rest of the team's sprint commitments
• Communicate the state of your team's test coverage regularly to your team, the Quality Guild, and the Automation team, with a documented, historical view of progress
• Contribute to our shared automation dashboards and monthly Automation Test Review, helping track test-suite growth, flaky/failing tests, and coverage trends over time
• Give feedback to the central Automation team on the platforms, tooling, and processes SDETs maintain, surfacing bottlenecks you hit in day-to-day work
• Partner with the Automation team on emerging tooling, such as CI-integrated continuous testing pipelines and AI-assisted test maintenance
• Write, run, and maintain automated tests in Playwright (migrating legacy web tests where applicable)
• Keep test suites healthy. Failing tests should not sit red for more than a sprint, trending toward no more than a week as you grow in the role
• Contribute to observability tooling (e.g., Grafana dashboards) that gives the team and Quality Guild visibility into automation health
• Execute manual test plans for new features and releases, especially where automated coverage doesn't yet exist
• Identify edge cases and collaborate with engineers to resolve them before release
• Participate fully in your team's ceremonies (planning, refinement, retros, stand-ups) as a core member
• Maintain a rolling roadmap of what areas of functionality you plan to automate, feeding into your team's quarterly planning
• Represent your team in Quality Guild and Automation team forums, including the monthly Automation Test Review

Benefits

• Career game changer – A truly unique experience to work for a fast-growing startup in a role with unlimited potential for growth
• Up to 95% of Medical Premiums, 50% of Dental & Vision Premiums, company-sponsored Life Insurance, 401K, and generous parental leave
• Medical (prescription drug and paramedical coverage), Dental, Vision, Life Insurance, STD, and LTD
• Flexible PTO policy and great work/life balance – We value and support each individual team member
• Annual parking stipend – we help people park!
• The opportunity to collaborate with fun, innovative, and passionate people in a casual, yet highly productive atmosphere