API Test Automation Lead

As the API Test Automation Lead, you will own API quality engineering, automation strategy, reliability validation, contract testing, and API security assurance across platforms. Automation testing experience is required. You will define the quality standards and tooling that ensure every API released is correct, performant, secure, and reliably testable through automated frameworks. This role is a part of the 0-to-1 vertical build. The person joining should be comfortable with ambiguity, high ownership, rapid iteration, hands-on execution, team building, and periods of high-intensity work during the early setup phase.

Responsibilities:

• Define and own the API quality engineering strategy: automation coverage targets, testing pyramid, and release quality gates.
• Build and maintain API automation frameworks covering REST, GraphQL, and gRPC across functional, contract, and regression dimensions.
• Establish contract testing standards using consumer-driven contract testing (Pact or equivalent) across service boundaries.
• Drive performance and load testing programs: baseline definition, degradation detection, and capacity validation.
• Define API security testing practices: authentication bypass, injection, rate limit validation, and OWASP API Top 10 coverage.
• Implement and govern quality gates across CI/CD pipelines: blocking gates, coverage thresholds, and reporting dashboards.
• Extend testing coverage to web, mobile, and end-to-end flows not limited to the API layer, ensuring full release validation.
• Own defect management lifecycle: triage, root-cause analysis, severity classification, and remediation tracking across teams.
• Lead the QA team and drive an automation-first testing culture: upskilling engineers and establishing testing standards across squads.

Requirements:

• Strong experience in automated web, mobile, API, and end-to-end test engineering; automation-first mindset required.
• Hands-on expertise in test automation frameworks and API testing tools.
• Strong understanding of test strategy, defect management, and release validation.
• Excellent debugging, root-cause analysis, and quality assurance skills.
• Experience leading QA teams and driving automation-first testing practices.