Playwright Test Automation Engineer

About the role We're looking for a Playwright Automation Test Engineer to build, scale, and maintain our end-to-end automated test suite across our platform. You'll work directly with our React front end and PHP/Python back-end services, writing robust, maintainable Playwright tests that give the team confidence to ship quickly. This is a highly hands-on automation role for someone who enjoys solving flaky-test problems and building testing tooling that scales with the codebase. What you'll do: Automation Architecture: Design, write, and maintain comprehensive end-to-end test suites using Playwright. Resilient Testing: Build reliable selectors and test patterns that hold up against a React component-based UI (data-testid conventions, component state, async rendering). CI/CD Integration: Integrate, run, and maintain Playwright tests directly within our deployment pipelines. Optimisation: Diagnose and fix flaky tests, continuously improving test stability and execution speed. Engineering Collaboration: Partner with front-end engineers to make the application more inherently testable (e.g., establishing accessible selectors and test hooks). Advanced QA Techniques: Set up visual regression, API mocking, and network interception where valuable or required. Advocacy: Report on test coverage and advocate for automation best practices across the wider team. What we're looking for: Automation Expertise: 2+ years of experience writing automated tests with Playwright (or strong Cypress/Selenium experience with a proven track record of rapidly transitioning to Playwright). Language Proficiency: Strong development skills in JavaScript or TypeScript. React Fluency: A solid working knowledge of React (component lifecycle, state, hooks, DOM updates) to write resilient selectors and debug UI timing issues. Full-Stack Comfort: Ability to work across a full stack of React, PHP, Python, and MySQL; Enough to read backend code, understand data flow, and write tests covering end-to-end behaviour. Pipeline Experience: Experience integrating test suites into CI/CD environments (GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, etc.). Deep Debugging Skills: Highly comfortable digging into Playwright trace viewers, screenshots, and network logs to root-cause failures. Testing Strategy: A strong understanding of the testing pyramid and knowing exactly where E2E tests fit alongside unit and integration tests. Nice to have: Cloud & Infrastructure: Experience with AWS (EC2, S3, Lambda, ECS) and Infrastructure as Code (Terraform, CloudFormation) for provisioning and scaling test environments. Containers: Experience running Playwright tests in containerised environments (Docker, ECS/Fargate). Advanced Playwright Features: Familiarity with network mocking, API testing, and visual regression tools. Workflow Tools: Strong GitHub workflow experience (PR reviews, branching strategies) and modern issue tracking (Linear/Jira). AI Acceleration: Experience leveraging tools like Claude to accelerate test authoring, debugging, or code reviews.