QA Automation Team Lead

R&D

Description

Papaya is a leading skill-based mobile gaming company, bringing together fun, competition, and real rewards for millions of players worldwide.

Driven by our vision to create one of the world’s most exciting player communities, we develop games powered by a large-scale B2C platform that supports tens of millions of daily tournaments and connects players around the world through social competitions.

Located in the heart of Warsaw, we offer a fast-moving environment, a culture of innovation, professional growth, and the opportunity to make a true impact.


We are looking for a high-caliber QA Automation Team Lead to spearhead our automation strategy, maintain and elevate our existing automation initiatives and tooling. As our QA Automation Team Lead, you will own the vision, architecture, and execution of test automation across our mobile portfolio. You will lead, challenge, and level up an established team of automation engineers, continuously evolving our proprietary in-house framework.

You will be a strategic partner to Game Engineering. You will elevate our adoption of AI across testing workflows, drive a culture of shift-left testing, and establish engineering quality gates that scale seamlessly with our active player base.

Responsibilities

  • Lead & Elevate the Team: Manage, mentor, and guide our team of QA automation engineers, fostering high technical standards, code quality, and engineering excellence.
  • Architect & Optimize Frameworks: Maintain and improve our in-house Unity test automation framework, ensuring high scalability, reliability, and maintainability across mobile platforms.
  • Expand Gameplay & Regression Coverage: Drive the design and implementation of automated test scenarios to expand coverage across real-time gameplay, core game loops, UI, and backend services.
  • Build Internal Tools & Utilities: Develop internal tools, harnesses, and utilities to support seamless test execution, detailed reporting, and smoother developer workflows.
  • Elevate AI in Automation: Take our existing AI-driven test generation to the next level—advancing AI adoption across test maintenance, flaky test mitigation, and intelligent defect triage.
  • Drive Shift-Left Testing: Collaborate closely with developers to define testable requirements early in the feature lifecycle, embedding testing disciplines and shared quality ownership.
  • Maintain Quality Gates & Stability: Oversee automated test executions within our CI/CD pipelines, enforcing rigorous quality gates, analyzing test results, and driving continuous improvements to game stability.
  • Observability & Metrics: Define and monitor key automation KPIs, including test coverage, pass rates, execution time, flakiness, and defect escape rates.

Requirements

  • Leadership Experience: 4+ years of experience leading, mentoring, or managing automation engineers, with a broader background (6+ years) in QA, test automation, or quality engineering.
  • Mobile Automation Expertise: Deep, hands-on experience building, scaling, and maintaining mobile test automation frameworks across iOS and Android.
  • Strong Coding Fundamentals: Solid programming and design skills in C#, Python, or Java.
  • Shift-Left & Quality Advocacy: Proven track record of influencing engineering teams toward shared quality ownership, early test integration, and robust quality gates.
  • Communication & Drive: Outstanding interpersonal and stakeholder-management skills, capable of aligning product, engineering, and QA leadership.

Advantages (Nice to Have)

  • Direct experience testing or automating within a Unity 3D environment.
  • Experience working on a live mobile, free-to-play, or core game title.
  • Experience with mobile device farms, emulators, simulators, or cloud-based device testing (Sauce Labs, AWS Device Farm, Firebase Test Lab).
  • Experience with AI-driven development and tooling.