QA Automation Manager (Krakow, Hybrid)

Location: Krakow, Lesser Poland, Poland

At First Advantage (Nasdaq: FA), people are at the heart of everything we do. From our customers and partners to our greatest advantage — our team members. Operating with empathy and compassion, First Advantage fosters a global inclusive workforce devoted to the diverse voices that make up our talent and products. Our team members empower each other to be their authentic selves and treat all with respect, integrity, and fairness. 

Say hello to a rewarding career and come join a leading provider of mission-critical background screening solutions to some of the most recognized Fortune 100 and Global 500 brands. 

About The Role:

We are seeking a QA Automation Manager to provide technical leadership, elevate automation strategy, and drive quality engineering across our modern, distributed SaaS ecosystem. This role goes beyond hands‑on automation: you will define best practices, lead automation architecture, improve engineering quality culture, and mentor global QA team to deliver reliable, scalable, and high‑performing solutions.

You’ll have significant ownership and influence, partnering with product, engineering, and architecture teams to shape our quality roadmap and uplift testing maturity across our platforms and services.

What You'll Do:

Automation Strategy & Architecture

• Define the automation vision, roadmap, and architectural standards across multiple products and services.
• Design scalable, reusable automation frameworks (UI, API, microservices, contract, and integration levels).
• Oversee automation framework consolidation, standardization, and governance across teams.
• Evaluate emerging tools and technologies to modernize our automation ecosystem.

• Mentor, coach, and upskill QA engineers across multiple locations and teams.
• Conduct technical reviews of frameworks, test design, test architecture, and automation code.
• Champion engineering best practices around observability, CI/CD quality gates, digital‑first testing, and shift‑left quality.
• Drive continuous improvement initiatives that reduce manual effort and increase automation efficiency and reliability.

• Partner with engineering leadership to define quality KPIs, metrics, and measurement frameworks.
• Ensure automation integrates effectively into CI/CD pipelines using GitHub Actions.
• Collaborate with developers, architects, and product managers to establish quality strategies, risk‑based test approaches, and acceptance criteria.
• Support exploratory, end-to-end, and UAT testing for complex scenarios where automation complements human validation

• 7–10+ years of hands‑on QA automation or test engineering experience.
• Proven experience leading automation strategy, frameworks, or quality engineering initiatives.
• Advanced proficiency with JavaScript/TypeScript‑based automation.
• Expertise with WebdriverIO and/or Playwright (primary tools).
• Strong experience testing distributed systems, microservices architectures, API communication flows, and event‑driven platforms.

• Deep understanding of automation design patterns and scalable framework architecture (Node.js/TypeScript preferred).
• Strong knowledge of REST API testing, schema validation, and contract testing.
• Familiarity with BDD practices and tools (e.g., Cucumber).
• Understanding of observability, monitoring, and logging tools as they relate to test ecosystems.

• Proficiency with GitHub, GitHub Actions, pipelines, workflow orchestration, and CI/CD quality gates.
• Strong Git practices: branching strategy, code review, PR quality standards.
• Experience integrating test frameworks with cloud testing platforms (BrowserStack, Sauce Labs, etc.).

• Ability to write and interpret SQL queries.
• Working knowledge of modern web technologies (HTML, CSS, DOM).

• Comfortable operating in Agile/Scrum environments.
• Strong communication and leadership skills, with an ability to influence cross‑functional teams.
• Ownership mindset with a focus on scalability, reliability, and long‑term improvements.
• Curiosity, adaptability, and commitment to elevating engineering quality.

• Experience with serverless computing (AWS Lambda, Azure Functions).
• Exposure to performance testing tools (k6, Gatling).
• Understanding of accessibility testing principles (WCAG 2.1 AA).

United States Equal Opportunity Employment:

First Advantage is proud to be a global leader in removing barriers and supporting our community members to ensure the changing demographics of the workforce are reflected in our hiring and employment practices. We value all of our candidates, employees, and clients, and place great emphasis on hiring and supporting qualified individuals in each role. We are an equal opportunity employer. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, color, ethnicity, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship status, marital status, disability, gender identity, gender expression, veteran status, genetic information, or any other area protected by applicable law.