An enterprise B2B SaaS platform ran an 8-hour regression suite, so critical breakage only surfaced at the end of a full run. I designed an 18-test smoke gate in GitLab CI/CD that blocks the pipeline on first failure, making critical failures visible in 2 minutes. A layered Robot Framework and Playwright suite on Page Object Model and Facade patterns covers 20 priority-one flows across Auth, Admin, Client and Supplier. Risk-based selection cut the gated surface ~40% with critical-path coverage intact. Matched-scope runs went 2.9x faster than Selenium. Flakiness held at 0.77%.