Automation Test Lead - Contractor

Job description

We are looking for an experienced Automation Test Lead to join us on a 12-month contract engagement.

This is a hands-on role for someone who thinks in systems, not test cases. You will own quality engineering across data pipelines, APIs, and cloud-native platforms – designing frameworks that teams actually adopt, embedding quality gates into CI/CD, and catching failures before they reach production.

Key Responsibilities

- Design and evolve a scalable, modular test automation framework for data pipelines (batch and streaming), APIs, and end-to-end data product validation

- Build reusable frameworks for SQL-based assertions, schema validation, data contracts, and lineage checks

- Design tests for schema drift, late-arriving data, duplicates, and failure scenarios like DLQ handling and backpressure

- Integrate data quality tools like Great Expectations or Soda and expose quality metrics through dashboards

- Embed quality gates into CI/CD pipelines – no pipeline reaches production without passing checks

- Automate compliance checks for PII exposure, encryption, and audit requirements (GxP, SOX, ISO)

- Mentor engineers and challenge weak implementations that impact reliability

Required Skills & Experience

- 9+ years in automation or quality engineering, with 5+ years building frameworks for data platforms at scale

- Strong Python for framework and library development; advanced SQL for validation and reconciliation

- Hands-on with DBT, Airflow, and Snowflake (or equivalent)

- Experience testing streaming systems – Kafka, Kinesis, or similar

- Solid CI/CD background (GitHub Actions, Jenkins) and AWS across data and compute services

- Familiarity with data quality and observability tooling (Great Expectations, Soda, Prometheus/Grafana)