Lead QA Engineer

About the role

VML, part of WPP, is a leading creative company that combines brand experience, customer experience, and commerce, creating connected brands to drive growth. VML is celebrated for its innovative and human first, award-winning work for blue chip client partners including AstraZeneca, Colgate-Palmolive, Dell, Ford, Microsoft, Nestlé, The Coca-Cola Company, and Wendy's. The agency is recognized by the Forrester Wave™ Reports, as a Leader among Marketing Creative and Content Service Providers, Commerce Services, Global Digital Experience Services, Global Marketing Services and, most recently, Marketing Measurement & Optimization. In addition, VML's specialist health network, VML Health, is one of the world's largest and most awarded health agencies. VML's global network is powered by 26,000 talented people across 55+ markets, with principal offices in Kansas City, New York, Detroit, London, São Paulo, Shanghai, Singapore, and Sydney. About WPP WPP is the trusted growth partner for the world's leading brands. We unite cutting-edge media intelligence and data solutions, world-class creativity, next-generation production, transformative enterprise solutions and expert strategic counsel in a single company - powered by exceptional talent and our agentic marketing platform, WPP Open, to help our clients navigate change, capture opportunity and deliver transformational growth. For more information, visit WPP.com . We're looking for a Lead QA Engineer to be the technical authority on complex accounts. This is a hands-on technical leadership role-you'll architect automation frameworks, solve the hard problems, and set the technical direction for QA on your engagements, as well as being an active member of the QA community. You're the person the team turns to when things get complicated. You've built automation from the ground up, you understand the trade-offs, and you know how to design solutions that scale. You lead through expertise-raising the bar technically and helping others grow through mentorship and demonstration. You're also an innovator. You're actively using AI tools to accelerate your work and you're thinking about what's next-whether that's self-healing tests, smarter automation, or new approaches to quality. You don't just follow best practice; you help shape it. And beyond the technical, you're a confident communicator who can hold your own with senior client stakeholders-explaining approaches, trade-offs, and recommendations to influence decisions at a project level.

Responsibilities

• Be the technical lead for QA on complex engagements-owning test strategy and the automation approach
• Architect, build, and evolve automation frameworks that others can rely on and contribute to
• Own and solve the hard technical problems-test architecture, flaky tests, CI/CD integration, environment issues
• Set the technical direction for QA on your accounts-tooling, approach, and structure
• Drive shift-left practices, embedding quality into requirements, design, and development
• Design and execute test strategies across UI, functional, integration, API, accessibility and regression testing
• Mentor and elevate QA engineers through hands-on collaboration and knowledge sharing
• Innovate with AI-using modern tools to work smarter and exploring what's next for QA
• Communicate technical recommendations and trade-offs to clients and internal teams
• Participate in client-facing forums-demos, triage, release calls, and technical discussions
• Contribute to a specialism and share knowledge across the wider QA community
• What we want from you:
• A clear track record in automation architecture and technical problem-solving
• Solid experience testing in complex, transactional environments
• Proficient in Playwright and TypeScript
• You've designed frameworks from scratch-not just written tests, but built the foundations
• Comfortable working across the full stack-Web apps, Native Apps, APIs, backends, logs, data
• Hands-on experience with AI-assisted development tools (e.g., GitHub Copilot, Cursor, Windsurf) and associated best practices.
• Strong understanding of CI/CD and how testing fits into modern delivery
• Experience working within agile scrum environments on complex, multi-stream deliveries
• Confident communicating technical concepts to clients, developers, and stakeholders
• A genuine continuous learner-curious, experimental, always evolving
• Pragmatic and delivery-focused, but motivated by a good technical challenge
• If you know some of this even better:
• Experience building AI-powered testing capabilities
• A QA specialism you're passionate about
• Experience working across distributed teams
• Contributions to tooling, frameworks, or knowledge sharing beyond your immediate team
• What we can offer you:
• Alongside the opportunity to work with some of the most exciting brands around the world, we'll also prioritise your career development and help you grow your skills. We'll empower you to make a

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