Vice President - Quality Assurance

The Lead QA Automation is RAKBANK's automation engineering authority, explicitly mandated to lead the bank's transformation from a predominantly manual testing organisation to an automation-first, AI-augmented quality engineering practice. This is a transformation role — the incumbent will inherit a landscape where the vast majority of testing is executed manually and will be expected to architect, build, and embed the frameworks, toolchains, and practices that change this reality. The Lead QA Automation reports to the Head of QA and is the technical lead for the automation engineering team — responsible for framework design, CI/CD pipeline integration, AI-assisted testing adoption, intelligent test data management, and the delivery of measurable automation coverage growth across RAKBANK's digital and banking platforms. This role demands a rare combination of automation engineering depth, product thinking about the developer/tester experience, and the leadership conviction to drive cultural change in how RAKBANK's engineering squads think about quality.

What You Will Do:

• Lead RAKBANK's QA automation transformation programme — establishing the automation vision, multi-quarter roadmap, and coverage targets, with a firm commitment to achieving 60–70% test automation coverage across regression, integration, and API test suites within an 18-month horizon; drive the structural shift from manual to automated quality delivery across all delivery squads, with AI-augmented testing as a core practice.

• Architect and build RAKBANK's enterprise test automation framework estate — UI automation (Playwright / Selenium / Appium for web and mobile), API automation (RestAssured / Karate / Postman/Newman), integration and contract testing (Pact), and data validation test harnesses for the Databricks data platform.

• Integrate automation frameworks into RAKBANK's CI/CD pipelines (GitHub Actions, Azure DevOps, or Harness) — ensuring automated regression suites execute on every merge/build, with clear pass/fail gates, test result dashboards, and automated failure triage.

• Drive AI-assisted testing adoption across the QA function: implement LLM-powered test case generation, self-healing test selectors, AI-based defect classification and root-cause suggestion, visual regression testing, and intelligent test prioritisation — making RAKBANK's QA practice AI-native.

• Implement shift-left automation practices — embedding automation engineers within delivery squads, championing BDD-style test authoring (Cucumber/Gherkin) that bridges business requirements and executable tests, and ensuring automation is written concurrently with feature development rather than after the fact.

• Establish intelligent test data management as an engineering discipline — designing synthetic test data generation frameworks, PII masking pipelines for cloned production data, on-demand test data provisioning APIs, and test data catalogues — eliminating test data as a blocker to automated test execution.

• Own API and service-layer automation — ensuring all microservices, REST APIs, GraphQL endpoints, and event-driven integrations (Kafka, IBM MQ) have contract tests, integration tests, and schema validation automation in place.

• Govern automation coverage metrics and produce automation health dashboards — tracking coverage by squad, module, risk tier, and release stream; reporting progress against the 60–70% automation target to the Head of QA and programme leadership; driving in-project automation as a delivery standard so that new features are delivered with automation test coverage by default, not as a post-delivery activity; identifying and remediating automation debt hotspots on a quarterly basis.

• Architect containerised and distributed test execution environments — using Docker, Kubernetes, and cloud-based device testing platforms (BrowserStack, Sauce Labs) to enable parallel, scalable, and on-demand test execution without environment constraints.

• Lead and develop the automation engineering team — conducting framework design reviews, code reviews, and capability development; running automation guilds and knowledge-sharing sessions; and recruiting and onboarding automation engineering talent.

• Evaluate and select automation tooling — maintaining awareness of the evolving test automation ecosystem, making pragmatic build-vs-buy decisions, and ensuring the automation toolchain is integrated into the developer portal managed by the DevEx team.

• Partner with the Head of QA on non-functional automation — extending automation coverage into performance test scripting (JMeter / Gatling / k6), chaos engineering experiments, and security scanning integration within pipelines.

What We Are Looking For:

• 10+ years in test automation engineering, with a minimum of 3 years as a Lead or Principal Automation Engineer in an agile delivery environment — ideally within a bank or digital-native organisation.

• Expert proficiency in at least two automation frameworks across UI and API layers: Playwright or Selenium for web; Appium for mobile; RestAssured or Karate for API; and strong command of Java, Python, or JavaScript/TypeScript as the automation language.

• Proven experience building test automation frameworks from a low-coverage baseline — with evidence of measurable coverage growth and automation adoption achieved in a previous role.

• Hands-on CI/CD integration experience — GitHub Actions, Azure DevOps, Jenkins, or Harness — with the ability to configure test execution stages, parallelism, and result reporting.

• Demonstrable experience or active exploration of AI-assisted testing tools (e.g., Testim, Mabl, Applitools, LLM-based test generation) and the ability to evaluate, pilot, and scale such capabilities.

• Experience designing test data management solutions — synthetic data generation, PII masking, and self-service test data provisioning.

• Familiarity with containerised test execution (Docker, Kubernetes) and cloud testing platforms (BrowserStack, Sauce Labs).

• Bachelor's degree in computer science, Software Engineering, or related field. ISTQB Test Automation Engineer certification is required.