Automation Lead Engineer

Location: Riyadh, Riyadh Province, Saudi Arabia

Department: Technology

Workplace: on_site

Employment Type: full

Description

Do you want to love what you do at work? Do you want to make a difference, an impact, transform peoples lives? Do you want to work with a team that believes in disrupting the normal, boring, and average?

If yes, then this is the job you're looking for ,webook.com is Saudi's #1 event ticketing and experience booking platforms in terms of technology, features, agility, revenue serving some of the largest mega events in the Kingdom surpassing over 2 billion sales. 

Role Overview

We are looking for a hands-on Automation Lead Engineer to join the Platform Team at webook. This is a technical role responsible for building, maintaining, and scaling automation frameworks that ensure high-quality, stable releases across our core backend, mobile, and platform services.

The Automation Lead Engineer will work closely with Platform Engineering, Backend, Mobile, DevOps, and QA teams to drive an automation-first and AI-first testing approach, strengthen system reliability, and ensure we deliver consistent, well-validated releases. This includes automation for backend microservices and APIs, mobile applications, and all core platform user journeys.

Key Responsibilities & Technical Focus Areas

Automation Strategy & Framework Ownership

• Lead the automation strategy for the Platform Team in alignment with engineering and product goals.
• Build, maintain, and scale automation frameworks for backend services, APIs, and distributed platform components.
• Develop reusable automation libraries, shared components, and developer-friendly tooling.
• Ensure the automation stack supports high-scale workloads, peak traffic events, and rapid deployments.

Backend & API Automation

• Own automation for backend microservices, APIs, and integration touchpoints.
• Implement contract testing, integration testing, and cross-service E2E validation.
• Ensure coverage for mission-critical platform flows such as checkout, payments, booking, reservations, and third-party integrations.
• Use observability tools (logs, metrics, traces) to debug failures, find gaps, and continuously improve test accuracy.

Mobile Automation

• Build and maintain automation suites for iOS and Android using modern mobile automation frameworks.
• Cover core user journeys, performance-sensitive flows, and version/device compatibility scenarios.
• Integrate mobile automation into CI/CD for continuous regression testing and fast feedback loops.

CI/CD Integration & Reliability

• Integrate all automation layers (backend, mobile, API, platform) into the CI/CD pipeline for stable, parallelized execution.
• Monitor and maintain high reliability across test pipelines by eliminating flaky tests and improving runtime performance.
• Ensure automation feedback is fast, actionable, and aligned with release readiness goals.

AI-First Automation & Quality Enhancements

• Drive an AI-first approach to automation 
• Promote automation-first, quality-by-design principles across engineering.
• Maintain up-to-date documentation for automation frameworks, patterns, and best practices.

Cross-Team Collaboration

• Collaborate with Backend, Platform, Mobile, QA, DevOps, and Product teams to validate platform readiness.
• Participate in architecture and integration discussions to ensure automated coverage is included early.
• Validate platform integrations with queues, microservices, data pipelines, and third-party APIs.

Technical Guidance

• Provide guidance to engineers on writing scalable and maintainable automation code.
• Support performance testing initiatives when needed.
• Act as the technical authority for automation practices within the Platform Team.

Team Leadership 

• Lead and mentor a team of 4–5 QA Automation Engineers, providing day-to-day guidance and support.
• Define and communicate technical direction for the team, ensuring clarity on best practices, automation frameworks, coding standards, and testing strategies.
• Review team members’ work, offer constructive feedback, and help unblock technical challenges.
• Coordinate task assignment, set priorities, and ensure high-quality, timely delivery of automation deliverables.
• Foster a collaborative, high-performance environment focused on continuous improvement and technical excellence.

Requirements

Essential Skills & Experience

• Proven experience as a Senior Automation Engineer or similar hands-on automation-focused role.
• Strong experience in automation for backend services, APIs, and distributed systems.
• Solid experience with mobile automation for iOS and Android.
• Proficiency in modern automation frameworks (e.g., Playwright, Cypress, PHPUnit/Dusk, Jest, Appium, Postman/Newman).
• Familiarity with AI-enhanced testing tools or a clear desire to adopt AI-based QA practices.
• Strong CI/CD knowledge and experience integrating automation in pipelines.
• Deep understanding of debugging distributed systems using logs, metrics, and traces.
• Strong technical communication and problem-solving skills.

Nice-to-Have

• Experience with performance tooling (k6, JMeter).
• Experience with observability platforms (Datadog, Sentry, Grafana, New Relic).
• Knowledge of microservices, queues, cloud-native environments (Docker, Kubernetes, GCP/AWS).
• Experience in a high-scale or fast-paced product engineering environment.

What We Offer

• A highly technical role with direct impact on platform reliability, automation maturity, and release stability.
• The opportunity to own and shape automation within the Platform Team.
• A modern engineering culture where automation and quality are core priorities.
• Competitive compensation package.
• Clear technical growth and ownership opportunities.