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Clara is the leading spend management platform in Latin America, serving 40,000+ businesses with corporate cards, bill pay, financing, and B2B payments. Named the fastest-growing company in Latin America by the Financial Times in 2025, Clara is backed by top-tier investors including Kaszek, Coatue, DST Global, and Goldman Sachs, with ~400 employees.
This is a technical leadership role for a QA Automation Lead who will own Clara's test automation strategy, frameworks, and quality standards across web, API, and mobile surfaces. This is not a people-management seat but rather a technical authority position where you partner with Engineering Directors, pod leads, and Product to make automation the default path to release confidence while mentoring QA and engineering teammates.
You will own the automation strategy and roadmap (test pyramid, risk-based prioritization, shift-left practices) aligned with product delivery across payments, onboarding, cards, and accounts. You are responsible for architecture decisions on shared automation frameworks (Playwright for web/API; Appium/Wdio for mobile), setting coding standards and maintainability rules for test code. You establish org-wide definitions for release-blocking coverage, flakiness thresholds, and what must be automated versus explored manually, protecting trust in automated results.
Stakeholder partnership is critical: you 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. You coach QA engineers and developers on automation craft, code review, and adoption of shared tooling, and run technical hiring signal for automation-related roles. You drive integration of automation into GitHub Actions (smoke on PR, regression on deploy), reporting tools (Allure/Qase or internal test-manager), and actionable failure triage.
You do not own formal people management (1:1s, performance ratings, compensation) unless explicitly scoped with your manager, nor do you absorb per-pod feature delivery ownership; you enable pods rather than becoming a bottleneck.
Clara offers competitive salary and stock options (ESOP) from day one, an annual learning budget, and accelerated development paths. The company works in English with Spanish and Portuguese spoken daily. The culture emphasizes clarity, simplicity, ownership, pride, continuous change, and inclusivity.
**Requirements:**
- 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
- 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 adoption, not only ticket-level scripts
- Ability to push back constructively on scope that undermines reliability or bus-factor health
- Excellent English (written and verbal); Spanish is a plus for LATAM collaboration
**Nice-to-Have:**
- Experience with AI-assisted QA tooling (agents that generate/execute tests from tickets, MCP/Playwright CLI workflows)
- Orchestration tools (e.g. n8n) and ticketing integrations (Linear)
- Internal test-management/reporting platforms or replacing external tools (Qase) with owned systems
- Financial/fintech product experience (payments, cards, onboarding)
- ISTQB or equivalent; prior QA Tech Lead or SDET Lead title
