Lead Software Development Engineer in Test

Role Overview

Lead Software Development Engineer in Test (Lead SDET) responsible for architecting and evolving the organization’s quality engineering strategy in an AI-driven development environment. You will lead automated testing frameworks and introduce responsible AI-assisted QA practices to improve quality maturity across functional, performance, security, accessibility, and AI-enabled product capabilities.

Responsibilities

• AI-Driven QA Strategy & Framework Ownership
  • Own and evolve automated testing frameworks and QA tooling ecosystem
  • Define best practices for AI-assisted test case generation, test data generation, and coverage discovery
  • Implement responsible AI guardrails for QA (validation, hallucination mitigation, structured outputs, review standards)
  • Introduce intelligent test selection and regression analysis to reduce cycle time
  • Ensure AI-augmented tests are deterministic, maintainable, and production-ready
• Test Architecture & Automation Excellence
  • Architect scalable automation across unit, integration, API, UI, contract, performance, and security testing
  • Apply modern testing principles (e.g., test pyramid / risk-based testing)
  • Integrate automation into CI/CD with enforceable quality gates and release-readiness criteria
  • Lead root-cause analysis for systemic quality issues and recurring defects
• AI System Testing & Evaluation
  • Design evaluation frameworks for AI-assisted features (ground-truth testing, deterministic validation, prompt robustness)
  • Define quality metrics (e.g., regression consistency, precision/recall where applicable, drift detection)
  • Add traceability for AI outputs (logging, version-aware regression suites)
  • Implement human-in-the-loop validation where appropriate
• Mentorship & Engineering Enablement
  • Mentor engineers on modern automation and AI-augmented workflows
  • Train teams on prompt engineering for QA validation
  • Set review standards for AI-assisted code contributions
• Quality Governance & Continuous Improvement
  • Define and track KPIs (defect escape rate, automation coverage by risk, test stability index)
  • Provide data-backed release readiness recommendations (Go/No-Go)
  • Audit automation ROI and retire low-value tests
• Cross-Functional Partnership
  • Partner with Engineering, Product, Security, and DevOps to embed quality early (shift-left)
  • Influence roadmaps and represent quality in architectural discussions
  • Ensure accessibility, security, and privacy testing are integrated into the SDLC

Requirements

• 8+ years in software quality engineering, test automation, or SDET roles
• 3+ years leading automation strategy or acting as a senior technical QA authority
• Hands-on experience using AI tools for test generation/refactoring/maintenance
• Experience evaluating LLM-based systems (prompt robustness, structured outputs, drift detection, versioned regression)
• Proficiency in at least one programming language: TypeScript, Java, or Python
• Experience with modern test frameworks such as Playwright, Cypress, or Selenium
• Demonstrated experience designing/scaling test automation frameworks and CI/CD quality gates
• Strong understanding of distributed systems, HTTP lifecycle, and database querying (SQL/NoSQL)
• Experience mentoring engineers and leading technical QA efforts

Nice-to-haves

• Experience with accessibility/security/privacy testing integration into SDLC (explicitly valued in responsibilities)