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API Automation Engineer
Own the service layer: contracts, auth, data setup and integration coverage.
Starting level: Tester comfortable with one languageTarget role: API Automation EngineerJourney: 2–3 months
Core skills
- HTTP semantics, status codes, headers, idempotency
- REST and GraphQL request design
- Authentication flows: OAuth2, JWT, API keys
- Schema and contract validation
- Chaining requests and managing test data
Recommended technologies
- Postman & Newman
- REST Assured or Playwright APIRequest
- JSON Schema
- Swagger/OpenAPI
- WireMock
- SQL
Practice labs
- Automate a full CRUD resource with negative cases
- Validate every response against its OpenAPI schema
- Build an auth helper that refreshes an expiring token
Projects
- An API regression suite running in CI with environment switching and schema checks
Interview preparation
- Difference between PUT, PATCH and POST with examples
- How you would test an endpoint with no documentation
- Contract testing versus integration testing
Suggested next step
- SDET or Performance Test Engineer
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