Principal Software Development Engineer - Test - Automation Testing

Roles & Responsibilities : - Define and implement the organization's overall test automation and quality engineering strategy.- Design and build scalable, maintainable automation frameworks for UI, API, mobile, microservices, and end-to-end testing.- Establish automation standards, coding practices, design patterns, and quality gates across engineering teams.- Drive shift-left testing, integrating quality activities throughout the software development lifecycle.- Partner closely with Software Engineers, Product Managers, DevOps, and Architects to improve product quality.- Own test strategy for complex and business-critical features, including functional, regression, integration, end-to-end, and exploratory testing.- Develop and maintain automated test suites with a strong focus on reliability, execution speed, and maintainability.- Integrate automated testing into CI/CD pipelines and enable continuous quality validation.- Identify and address flaky tests, test environment issues, and automation bottlenecks.- Define and track quality metrics, test coverage, defect trends, automation effectiveness, and release quality.- Lead initiatives around performance, scalability, reliability, and API/service-level testing where applicable.- Evaluate and introduce new testing tools, technologies, and frameworks where they provide measurable value.- Conduct technical reviews of test automation architecture and provide guidance on engineering best practices.- Mentor and coach SDETs, QA engineers, and software engineers on automation and quality engineering practices.- Establish a culture of quality ownership, where developers and QA engineers jointly own product quality.- Lead root-cause analysis of critical production defects and drive preventive actions.Preferred Candidate Profile :- 8-10 years of experience in Software Development in Test (SDET), Quality Engineering, Test Automation, or a closely related software engineering role.- Proven experience working as a Senior SDET / Lead SDET / Principal SDET / Quality Engineering Lead or equivalent technical role.- Strong programming skills in at least one language such as Java, Python, JavaScript/TypeScript, or C#.- Strong hands-on experience designing and developing automation frameworks from the ground up.- Excellent understanding of object-oriented programming, design patterns, data structures, algorithms, and clean code practices.- Strong experience with API and service-level automation, in addition to UI automation.- Experience with automation tools/frameworks such as Selenium, Playwright, Cypress, Appium, REST Assured, or equivalent technologies.- Strong knowledge of CI/CD and DevOps practices, preferably with Jenkins, GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Azure DevOps, or similar platforms.- Experience with Git, build tools, test reporting, logging, and defect-management systems.- Good understanding of microservices, REST APIs, databases, distributed systems, and cloud environments.- Experience with Docker/Kubernetes and cloud platforms such as AWS, Azure, or GCP is desirable.- Exposure to performance testing, security testing, contract testing, and reliability testing is an advantage.- Demonstrated ability to define test strategies and quality processes for complex products.- Strong analytical and problem-solving skills, with the ability to troubleshoot failures across application, infrastructure, and automation layers. (ref:hirist.tech)