QA Automation Lead (Líder de Automatización de QA) - Remote First

Clara is the leading spend management platform in Latin America. More than 40,000 businesses run on our corporate cards, bill pay, financing and B2B payments, and in 2025 the Financial Times named Clara the fastest-growing company in Latin America. We're ~400 people, backed by Kaszek, monashees, Coatue, DST Global, ICONIQ, General Catalyst and Goldman Sachs, among others. We are looking for a QA Automation Lead to own Clara's test automation strategy, frameworks, and quality standards. This is a technical leadership role for someone who sets the automation bar across web, API, and mobile surfaces — not a classic people-manager seat. You partner with Engineering Directors, pod leads, and Product to make automation the default path to release confidence, while mentoring QA and engineering teammates who build and adopt the frameworks. The Role You are the technical authority for QA automation at Clara. You own the strategy, architecture, and reliability of the automation platform (Playwright-based web/API frameworks, CI integration, reporting, and enablement) so pods can ship with confidence without QA becoming a bottleneck. What You Own Automation strategy — Define and evolve the automation roadmap (test pyramid, risk-based prioritization, shift-left practices) aligned with product delivery across surfaces such as payments, onboarding, cards, and accounts. Framework ownership — Own architecture decisions for shared automation frameworks (e.g. Playwright for web/API; Appium/Wdio where mobile automation applies). Set coding standards, review patterns, and maintainability rules for test code. Quality standards — Establish org-wide definitions for release-blocking coverage, flakiness thresholds, and what must be automated vs. explored manually. Protect trust in automated results. Stakeholder partnership — Align with Engineering Directors, Pod Leads, Product, and Platform/Infra on capacity trade-offs, environment/test-data dependencies, and adoption plans so pods own execution while QA owns the capability. Mentoring & enablement — Coach QA engineers and developers on automation craft, code review, and adoption of shared tooling. Run technical hiring signal for automation-related roles. CI/CD & observability — Drive integration of automation into GitHub Actions (smoke on PR, regression on deploy), reporting (e.g. Allure/Qase or internal test-manager), and actionable failure triage. What You Don't Own Formal people management (1:1s, performance ratings, compensation) unless explicitly scoped with your manager — that remains with Engineering/QA Directors. Per-pod feature delivery ownership; you enable pods, you do not absorb every manual validation request. Technical Skills 6+ years in software quality engineering with deep automation experience (not manual-only QA). Hands-on ownership of test automation frameworks for web and API (Playwright strongly preferred; Cypress, Selenium, or Webdriver.io also relevant). Experience designing modular, data-driven suites (Page Object / screen patterns, tagging for @smoke / @regression , selective CI execution). Solid programming skills in TypeScript and/or JavaScript; comfort reading and reviewing production-adjacent code (Java/Spring or React is a plus). API testing expertise (contract/integration layers) and familiarity with SQL / test-data design. CI/CD integration experience (GitHub Actions or equivalent); understanding of flaky-test management and parallelization. Familiarity with Agile/Scrum or Kanban delivery and risk-based test prioritization. Exposure to mobile automation (Appium, BrowserStack) is valuable given Clara's multi-surface products. Soft Skills Proven technical leadership: framework decisions, mentoring, and raising the quality bar across multiple teams. Strong stakeholder communication — able to translate automation trade-offs for Product and engineering leadership. Strategic mindset: you plan roadmaps and a