Software Development Engineer - Test III

As an SDET 3 you'll act as a quality leader within the engineering org, driving large-scale test automation, building systems that improve reliability, and raising the overall bar of engineering practices. Beyond hands-on test design and automation, you will influence architecture decisions, champion quality metrics, and create frameworks that scale across pods and teams. A key part of this role is to build and evolve quality platforms, tools, and developer-facing capabilities that make testing faster, easier, and seamlessly integrated into the SDLC. You'll help shift quality from a gated activity to a built-in engineering capability. This role requires strong technical depth, leadership in problem-solving, and the ability to mentor and coach other engineers to embed quality as a culture.Responsibilities : - Own and evolve automation frameworks and test infrastructure that scale with product growth and complexity.- Partner with engineering leadership to define quality strategy, KPIs, and guardrails across pods.- Architect, design, and implement automation solutions for end-to-end testing across UI, APIs, services, and integrations.- Lead root cause analysis of complex production issues and drive initiatives to prevent recurrence.- Establish best practices in test data management, mocking/stubbing, contract testing, and observability in QA.- Drive continuous improvement of CI/CD pipelines for faster and more reliable releases.- Mentor, coach, and upskill SDET1/2s, setting technical direction and reviewing automation design.- Collaborate with product managers, architects, and developers to influence design and architecture decisions for testability and resilience.- Identify gaps in automation or coverage and lead efforts to reduce flakiness, improve coverage, and cut down customer-reported bugs.Requirements : - 6+ years of experience in software test automation and quality engineering.- Strong coding proficiency in JavaScript/TypeScript, Python, or Java, with the ability to design frameworks from scratch.- Deep expertise in automation tools (e.g., Playwright, Cypress, Jest, Mocha, PyTest, and Selenium).- Proven track record of building and scaling automation frameworks for large-scale distributed systems.- Hands-on experience with microservices, APIs, and GraphQL.- Strong understanding of CI/CD pipelines, DevOps practices, and cloud-native infrastructure (AWS/GCP/Azure).- Experience in leading quality initiatives and influencing engineering culture.Nice to have : - Experience with performance and load testing at scale (e.g., Locust, JMeter, k6).- Knowledge of security testing practices and tools.- Familiarity with observability stacks (Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, OpenTelemetry).- Experience in shaping testing strategy in startups or scaling products from early stages to enterprise level.- Contributions to open-source test automation frameworks. (ref:hirist.tech)