Senior Test Automation Engineer (DF)

Lely, founded in 1948, is committed to creating a sustainable, profitable, and enjoyable future in agriculture. Driven by the challenges farmers face and the needs of cows, we develop high-quality robots and data systems that improve animal welfare, flexibility, and productivity on dairy farms. Our mission is to support sustainable food production.

For more than 30 years, we have been a global leader in the sales and service of automated systems for successive generations of dairy farmers. Every day, we inspire our colleagues to provide customers with innovative solutions and to be a reliable partner for long-term advice and support. With our state-of-the-art Lely Campus in Maassluis and a worldwide network of dedicated Lely Centers offering tailored sales and service, Lely operates in more than fifty countries.

At Lely, software plays a crucial role in the performance, reliability, and safety of our robotic and farm management solutions. Every day, our products help dairy farmers around the world work more efficiently while improving animal welfare and supporting sustainable food production.

As a Senior Test Automation Engineer, you help shape the quality engineering and test automation strategy for Horizon, Lely's farm management platform. You provide technical direction, drive improvements across multiple teams, and help elevate the maturity of our testing practices. Your focus goes beyond building and maintaining automated tests; you create the conditions that enable teams to deliver high-quality software with confidence.

You take ownership of strategic quality initiatives, identify opportunities for improvement, and help teams make informed decisions based on objective quality data. You play a leading role in advancing our automation approach across multiple test levels, including component, API, and end-to-end testing. This includes further developing our component testing capabilities, designing, implementing, and maintaining the underlying test infrastructure, such as CI/CD test pipelines, test execution environments, and CI/CD runners. You drive continuous improvements to the test platform, ensuring fast, reliable feedback throughout the software delivery lifecycle and enabling teams to deliver high-quality software with confidence.

As a senior member of the Test Automation Chapter, you help define standards, share best practices, coach fellow engineers, and contribute to the long-term direction of test automation within Digital Farming. Many improvements extend beyond a single development team, requiring you to build alignment and collaborate effectively with stakeholders and engineering teams in the Netherlands, Turkey and Portugal.

Alongside these chapter-wide responsibilities, you are also part of a Scrum team, where you contribute hands-on to the design, implementation, and maintenance of automated tests and quality practices within Horizon.

The work is carried out primarily from our campus in Maassluis. Occasional travel to Turkey is expected to support collaboration and successful implementation of improvements across teams.

Your main responsibilities include:

• Defining and evolving the test automation strategy across component, API, and end-to-end testing.
• Leading quality improvement initiatives and driving adoption across multiple teams.
• Providing technical direction and coaching to fellow test automation engineers within the Test Automation Chapter.
• Taking ownership of the component testing domain, including defining the approach, expanding component test coverage, and integrating it into the CI/CD pipeline.
• Driving collaboration between testing, software development, architecture, and other technical disciplines across the Netherlands and Turkey.
• Providing objective insights on product quality, risk, and release readiness.

Hands-on responsibilities

• Designing, implementing, and maintaining automated E2E and API tests using TypeScript and Playwright.
• Designing, implementing, and maintaining component tests using C# and Testcontainers.
• Supporting the migration from Cucumber to Playwright.
• Managing and improving CI/CD test pipelines in GitLab.
• Owning the automated quality gates that determine merge readiness.
• Managing the Windows VM test lab and associated infrastructure.
• Maintaining dashboards, reporting pipelines, and quality metrics.
• Maintaining the supporting tooling and scripts used for test execution and infrastructure automation in PowerShell, Python, Azure, Windows, and Kubernetes environments.

You are a people-oriented senior engineer with a strong technical foundation and a passion for product quality. You enjoy helping engineers grow, bringing teams together, and creating clarity in complex development environments.

In addition, you bring:

• A bachelor's or master's degree in Software Engineering or another relevant technical discipline, or equivalent working and thinking ability.
• AT least 5 years of experience in test automation, verification, or quality engineering within a technical product development environment.
• Experience guiding, coaching, or mentoring engineers in technical initiatives.
• A broad technical interest and affinity with multidisciplinary systems, software, and robotics.
• Strong communication and stakeholder management skills, with the ability to build alignment across different teams and disciplines.
• Fluency in English.

Working at Lely means contributing to sustainable progress within one of the most innovative organizations in the Netherlands. You help make the agricultural sector more futureproof, and we ensure you have the space, resources, and support to do so.

• An international work environment that values collaboration, initiative, and diverse perspectives.
• A culture that encourages learning, experimentation, and ownership of ideas.
• Excellent employment conditions, including up to 8 weeks of vacation per year and a strong pension scheme.
• A salary range of € 6.000 - € 8.000 gross per month, with clear opportunities for growth within the scale.
• Full ownership of your own development, with access to a wide range of courses through the Lely Academy.
• Daily access to outstanding sports facilities at the Lely Campus: an indoor gym, outdoor padel courts, basketball and volleyball courts, table tennis, and table football. You can join Hyrox workouts or sign up for personal training and challenge your colleagues during an active break.
• Fresh coffee and tea from our own barista (with milk from our own farm) and a healthy, affordable company restaurant.

Work-life balance

• A healthy work-life balance thanks to our hybrid working policy: you work at least three days a week on Campus, with flexible hours and plenty of opportunity to spend additional time onsite (between 06:00 and 20:00).
• A free shuttle bus that takes you to and from the metro station in Maassluis, ensuring your workday starts and ends smoothly.
• And of course: we love to celebrate! Whether it’s an anniversary or the annual Christmas party. At Lely, we know how to do it. For an impression of our events, take a look at this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6WA3e0WHbxE

We are also proud that our vision and efforts have been recognized with the Rotterdam Entrepreneurs Award 2025.

Recruitment & selection agency, consultancy, and/or staffing agency?

We appreciate the interest, but we recruit all our candidates directly. We understand that as intermediaries, you want to present candidates for our great positions and contribute to our ambitions, but this is not how we have set up our recruitment process. This means that all unsolicited profiles offered on Lely vacancies will be treated as direct applications.