Technical Automation Lead

Technical Automation Lead

Thoriva · Remote · Full-Time

Thoriva, an Infinite Company, is seeking an experienced IT Automation Leader to lead and develop its existing test automation engineers, establish modern and consistent automation standards, and champion an automation-first mindset across technology delivery and operations.

This leader will strengthen the team’s current test automation capabilities while building a practical roadmap for broader automation. The role will improve framework ownership, engineering discipline, delivery consistency, and measurement across web, API, mainframe, data, and integration testing, then apply those practices to other repeatable activities across software delivery and IT operations.

The successful candidate will be a hands-on people and technology leader who can balance immediate delivery needs with long-term transformation, earn the trust of engineers and stakeholders, and make automation a fundamental part of how work is designed and executed.

ABOUT THE COMPANY

Thoriva is an AI technology company delivering intelligent, data-driven solutions to transform government operations. We combine AI solutions, commercial expertise, and complex business logic to address government and federal agencies’ biggest challenges.

JOB SUMMARY

As Technical Automation Leader, you will focus on three priorities: leading the existing test automation engineering team; adopting modern, sustainable automation standards; and championing automation across application delivery, IT operations, infrastructure, data processing, and business workflows. You will translate these priorities into measurable improvements in delivery speed, test coverage, reliability, consistency, cost, and risk reduction.

Key Responsibilities

Priority 1: Lead and Develop the Existing Test Automation Team

• Provide day-to-day leadership, coaching, prioritization, and technical direction for the existing test automation engineers and technical leads.

• Assess current team capabilities, clarify roles and ownership, identify skill gaps, and establish development plans that strengthen both technical depth and business knowledge.

• Align automation work with release priorities, product risk, recurring regression needs, and the areas of greatest manual effort.

• Improve planning, estimation, execution, code review, defect triage, maintenance, and reporting practices across the team.

• Create clear accountability for automation frameworks, shared components, test data, environments, execution results, and failure analysis.

• Build a culture of collaboration, engineering discipline, continuous learning, and measurable delivery outcomes.

• Partner with Development, Quality Engineering, Release Management, and business stakeholders to integrate automation into delivery decisions and operating processes.

Priority 2: Adopt Modern and Sustainable Automation Standards

• Define and implement enterprise standards for UI, API, mainframe, integration, regression, batch, and data-validation automation.

• Establish reusable architecture patterns, coding conventions, source-control practices, code-review expectations, documentation requirements, and framework governance.

• Modernize existing frameworks and toolsets to improve reliability, maintainability, scalability, execution speed, and ease of use.

• Integrate automated validation into CI/CD pipelines and release processes to provide earlier feedback and consistent delivery controls.

• Establish standards for test data management, environment readiness, result reporting, failure classification, defect traceability, and maintenance of automated assets.

• Define an automation roadmap across legacy, web, API, cloud, mainframe, data, and infrastructure technology stacks.

• Use meaningful metrics-including automated coverage, execution time, pass-rate stability, maintenance effort, failure analysis, escaped defects, and manual effort eliminated-to guide priorities and demonstrate value.

Priority 3: Champion Automation in Everything We Do

• Promote automation-first thinking so teams consider automation whenever work is repetitive, high-volume, error-prone, time-sensitive, or dependent on consistent execution.

• Identify and prioritize automation opportunities across environment provisioning, configuration, deployment, release verification, monitoring, incident triage, data reconciliation, batch execution, compliance evidence, reporting, and business workflows.

• Apply process-discovery and value-assessment methods to evaluate opportunities based on frequency, effort, risk, complexity, and measurable return.

• Partner with technology and business teams to create reusable automated controls, validations, approvals, workflows, and self-service capabilities.

• Lead the responsible adoption of AI-assisted engineering to accelerate analysis, script generation, documentation, troubleshooting, test creation, and operational decision support.

• Establish governance, security controls, human review requirements, and support models for AI-enabled and intelligent automation.

• Create visible automation roadmaps and communicate results through hours saved, cycle-time improvement, reliability, risk reduction, and business value.

Required Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent relevant experience.

• 10+ years of progressive experience in software engineering, software testing, test automation, DevOps, or related technology disciplines.

• 5+ years of leadership experience directly guiding test automation engineers, automation teams, or comparable technical delivery teams.

• Demonstrated success assessing an existing automation practice and improving its people, standards, frameworks, execution, and measurable outcomes.

• Strong hands-on understanding of UI, API, integration, regression, data-validation, and CI/CD automation.

• Experience designing, modernizing, and governing automation frameworks, reusable components, integrations, and execution pipelines.

• Ability to translate product risk, release priorities, operational needs, and repetitive work into a practical automation roadmap.

• Experience defining and using automation metrics to improve coverage, reliability, maintainability, delivery speed, and business value.

• Strong understanding of software delivery across legacy and modern platforms, including source control, code review, test data, environments, observability, release management, and operational controls.

• Experience transforming a legacy software development team into an AI and Automation first mindset

• Excellent people leadership, communication, organizational change, and stakeholder management skills.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience in federal services or government consulting.

• Experience leading globally distributed technology teams.

• Experience automating testing and operational processes across legacy mainframe and modern distributed applications.

• Experience with tools such as Playwright, Tosca, UiPath, Power Automate, Ansible, Terraform, Jenkins, GitHub Actions, Azure DevOps, ServiceNow, Postman, or comparable technologies.

• Experience integrating automated validation into GitHub, GitLab, Azure DevOps, Jenkins, or similar CI/CD platforms.

• Experience with cloud automation in AWS or Azure.

• Familiarity with high-volume batch processing, enterprise data validation, job scheduling, monitoring, and event-driven automation.

• Experience implementing AI-assisted development, automation generation, agentic workflows, or operational analytics.

• SAFe, Agile, PMP, DevOps, cloud, automation, or process-improvement certifications are a plus.

Compensation & Benefits

• Competitive base salary commensurate with experience and scope of the role

• Comprehensive benefits package including health, dental, vision, 401(k), and paid time off (PTO)

• Flexibility for remote work