Senior Automation Engineering Manager

<p>Toast is driven by building the restaurant platform that helps restaurants adapt, take control, and get back to what they do best: building the businesses they love.</p> <p>As a Senior Engineering Manager focused on Automation Engineering, you will lead a team of Automation Engineers responsible for building and evolving automation platforms that enable Toast to deliver high-quality software at scale. You will define automation strategy, establish best practices, and deliver frameworks that empower product engineering teams to build and maintain their own automated tests.</p> <p>You will partner closely with Product Management and Engineering leaders across our Business Systems organization to prioritize high-impact automation initiatives, accelerate developer productivity, and reduce reliance on manual testing of happy-path scenarios. This role has broad technical and organizational influence and is a critical lever for improving delivery speed, confidence, and consistency across Toast.</p> <h2><strong>About this Role (Responsibilities)</strong></h2> <ul> <li>Lead and manage a team of Automation Engineers across multiple locations, providing technical mentorship, career development, and performance management.</li> <li>Own the automation engineering vision and roadmap, defining standards, patterns, and best practices aligned with Toast’s architecture and CI/CD pipelines.</li> <li>Design, scale, and maintain automation frameworks and platforms that are reliable, maintainable, and easy for engineering teams to adopt and extend.</li> <li>Enable engineering teams to own automation by providing strong frameworks, documentation, and tooling embedded into developer workflows.</li> <li>Partner with Product Management and Engineering leadership to prioritize automation investments based on business impact and delivery risk.</li> <li>Integrate automation deeply into the software development lifecycle, including CI/CD pipelines, build gates, and release processes.</li> <li>Define and track key automation metrics, including effectiveness, execution performance, flakiness, and impact on developer productivity.</li> <li>Provide hands-on technical leadership through architecture reviews, framework decisions, and code reviews as needed.</li> </ul> <h2><strong>Do You Have the Right Ingredients? (Requirements)</strong></h2> <ul> <li>10+ years of experience leading and scaling automation engineering teams in a modern software engineering environment.</li> <li>Strong technical depth in automation engineering, including API, UI, and integration testing strategies.</li> <li>Hands-on experience with modern automation tools and frameworks such as Playwright, Cypress, Selenium, RestAssured, Postman/Newman, Karate, or similar.</li> <li>Proficiency in programming or scripting languages commonly used for automation, including Java, TypeScript/JavaScript, Python, or similar.</li> <li>Proven experience building shared automation platforms and frameworks adopted by multiple engineering teams.</li> <li>Experience integrating automation into CI/CD pipelines using tools such as GitHub Actions, Pipeline development for Jenkins, CircleCI, GitLab CI, and Git-based workflows.</li> <li>Experience defining automation metrics and using data to drive prioritization and improvement.</li> <li>Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or equivalent practical experience.</li> </ul> <h2><strong>Special Sauce (Nice to Haves)</strong></h2> <ul> <li>Experience modernizing and scaling large automation codebases, including reducing technical debt and improving reliability and execution performance.</li> <li>Hands-on experience with test management and reporting ecosystems, such as TestRail or similar platforms, including building custom dashboards to communicate automation health and impact.</li> <li>Experience working with enterprise SaaS and business systems (e.g., Salesforce, NetSuite, Workday, or similar), including their APIs, complex data flows, and system integrations.</ ... (truncated, view full listing at source)