Senior Software Development Engineer in Test

Role Overview

Qualia is hiring a Senior Software Development Engineer in Test (Senior SDET) to build automation, tooling, and quality systems for AI-driven products. The role is software engineer first: you will create test infrastructure and reliability tooling (not manual test cases or test scripting).

What You’ll Work On

• Build and maintain test infrastructure and release orchestration tooling as production-grade software.
• Develop test automation frameworks, including a migration from Cypress to Playwright.
• Own core infrastructure such as:
  • Test environment provisioning
  • Parallelization
  • CI/CD test execution at scale
• Define and implement strategy across the testing pyramid (unit, integration, API, end-to-end), ensuring each layer has the right coverage.
• Partner on release systems that manage:
  • Build promotion
  • Deployment gating
  • Rollback across environments
• Add observability to test frameworks/scripts:
  • Track flakiness, execution time, and failure patterns to improve automation reliability.
• Tackle complex problems such as flaky test infrastructure and AI-assisted testing tooling, from design through deployment.

Responsibilities

• Design and build automation frameworks and infrastructure.
• Own and improve CI/CD-driven test execution and environment management.
• Implement observability for test reliability metrics.
• Mentor other engineers on writing better tests and infrastructure code.

Requirements

• 5+ years of experience as a software engineer building test infrastructure, developer tooling, or release engineering systems.
• Strong programming skills in JavaScript/TypeScript; ability to build backend services/tools for test infrastructure.
• Experience scaling CI/CD systems and/or release orchestration (environment management, parallelization, execution frameworks).
• Deep understanding of the testing pyramid and selecting the right automation approach/tooling per layer.
• Experience adding observability/monitoring to test frameworks (flakiness, trends, failure signals).
• Hands-on experience using AI tools in the quality workflow.

Nice-to-Haves

• Experience with end-to-end test automation at scale and migration efforts (e.g., Cypress → Playwright).