Role Summary
Sr. SDET / Staff Engineer (SDET) is responsible for designing, developing, and maintaining robust automation frameworks and test suites across web, mobile, and API layers. This role works closely with QA Leads, developers, and product teams to enable continuous testing, improve release quality, and progressively adopt AI-enabled quality engineering practices, including RAG-based utilities, AI toolchains, and QE accelerators.
Skills Required – Automation Frameworks, Web UI, API, Mobile and AI
Qualifications / Skillset Requirements
Roles & Responsibilities
Experience & Background
Automation Design & Development
- 6–10 years of experience as a Software Development Engineer in Test (SDET) or Test Automation Engineer.
- Design, develop, and maintain modular, reusable automation frameworks for web, mobile, and API layers.
- Strong track record of building and executing automated regression and integration suites in Agile/Scrum environments.
- Translate user stories, acceptance criteria, and manual test cases into robust automated tests.
- Solid understanding of software testing fundamentals, test design techniques, and defect lifecycle.
- Implement page object, BDD/ATDD, and other relevant patterns to keep automation suites maintainable and scalable.
Programming & Automation Tools
Test Execution & CI/CD Integration
- Proficiency in at least one object-oriented programming language (Java or Python preferred).
- Integrate automated tests into CI/CD pipelines (e.g., Jenkins, GitHub Actions or similar) to support continuous testing.
- Hands-on experience with UI test automation tools/frameworks such as Selenium WebDriver (or equivalent).
- Configure and monitor scheduled test runs, analyzing failures and working with developers to isolate issues.
- Experience with mobile automation using tools such as Appium (or equivalent), including real device and emulator/simulator testing.
- Maintain test suites to ensure stability, reliability, and efficient execution time, regularly refactoring to remove redundancy.
- Strong experience with API testing tools and libraries (e.g., Rest Assured, Postman, or similar) and understanding of REST, JSON, XML.
- Collaborate with DevOps to ensure proper setup of test environments, test data seeding, and environment health checks.
- Familiarity with BDD frameworks (e.g., Cucumber, Serenity) and ability to write readable, behaviour-focused tests.
- Provide timely, detailed reporting on automation execution, coverage, and trends for each sprint and release.
AI & GenAI Skills (varied depth across team members)
AI-Enabled Quality Engineering
- For selected senior SDET roles: deep AI/GenAI expertise including: – Building and validating AI-based applications and evaluation harnesses. – Implementing and tuning RAG pipelines and agentic AI workflows. – Strong Python skills with hands-on experience using libraries such as LangChain and related ecosystems. – Integrating QE accelerators and AI services into automation frameworks.
- For AI expert SDETs: design and implement AI-powered utilities for test data generation, automated test design, log analysis, and defect prediction using RAG, agentic AI, and QE accelerators.
- Strong ability to consume AI toolchains for QE, including prompting, configuring workflows, and interpreting AI outputs to support testing and quality analysis.
- Configure, run, and leverage AI-based QE toolchains for tasks such as requirement summarization, test case derivation, and impact analysis.
- Foundational understanding of GenAI concepts with motivation to be trained and upskilled on AI-assisted testing tools and QE accelerators.
- Apply AI-generated artefacts (tests, data, summaries) responsibly, validating and refining them to ensure correctness, completeness, and adherence to quality standards.
Engineering Practices & Tooling
Collaboration, Quality & Improvement
- Strong experience with Git-based version control (GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket, etc.), branching strategies, and code review practices.
- Work closely with QA Leads, developers, and product owners to understand requirements and clarify acceptance criteria.
- Familiarity with build tools (Maven/Gradle or similar) and test reporting frameworks (Allure, Extent, or similar).
- Participate in sprint planning, estimation, daily stand-ups, and retrospectives, providing accurate inputs for automation scope and effort.
- Understanding of microservices, distributed systems, logging, and basic observability concepts to support debugging and validation.
- Participate in defect triage and Root Cause Analysis sessions; contribute detailed analysis of failures and suggest preventive automation improvements.
- Experience working with test management and defect tracking tools (e.g., Jira, XRay or similar).
- Continuously refactor and enhance automation frameworks, utilities, and pipelines to improve reliability, maintainability, and performance.
Soft Skills & Mindset
Knowledge Sharing & Standards
- Strong analytical and debugging skills with a “break the system” mindset and attention to detail.
- Adhere to and help define coding standards, automation guidelines, and best practices for the QA organization.
- Ability to work independently while collaborating effectively in a cross-functional team.
- Mentor and support junior SDETs and QE engineers in automation, AI tool usage, and quality engineering practices.
- Clear and concise communication skills—written and verbal—with the ability to explain technical issues and solutions to non-technical stakeholders.
- Contribute to documentation of frameworks, AI utilities, and usage patterns; actively share learnings and best practices with the wider QE team.
