Senior Manager, SDET

As a Senior SDET Manager, your primary role will be to lead, mentor, and scale a team of Software Development Engineers in Test (SDETs) to ensure high-quality, scalable, and high-performing software delivery. You will be instrumental in promoting quality throughout the software development lifecycle by advocating for test automation, performance engineering, observability, and continuous validation strategies. This hands-on leadership position requires a combination of technical expertise, people development skills, and cross-functional collaboration to drive excellence in quality. Your key responsibilities and duties will include leading, coaching, and developing a proficient team of SDETs focused on Web, Mobile, and API test automation. You will drive the adoption of quality engineering best practices across engineering teams, such as shift-left testing, code quality gates, and automation-first approaches. Collaboration with cross-functional partners in development, product, design, security, and DevOps will be essential in defining quality strategies, goals, and roadmaps. Moreover, you will oversee the planning and execution of various testing strategies including unit, integration, system, regression, exploratory, and performance testing for key product areas. You will be required to architect, build, and enhance scalable and reusable automation frameworks and tools to accelerate testing velocity and enhance coverage. Emphasizing continuous integration and delivery practices by incorporating automated tests into CI/CD pipelines and production monitoring workflows will also be part of your responsibilities. As the Senior SDET Manager, you will own quality KPIs and ensure accountability through data-driven reporting and analysis. This will involve monitoring metrics such as escaped defect rates, test coverage, and MTTR. Additionally, maintaining the availability, stability, and scalability of test environments, data, and pipelines will be crucial. You will also play a role in talent acquisition, onboarding, career development, and retention of SDETs to foster an inclusive and engaged team culture. Furthermore, you will act as a strategic quality leader and representative for key product domains or enterprise programs. Balancing speed with quality and advocating for proactive defect prevention will be essential in your role. In terms of required skills, a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience is necessary. You should have over 10 years of industry experience in software engineering or quality engineering, including at least 5 years in a technical leadership role managing QA/SDET teams. Deep expertise in test automation across UI (Web/Mobile), API, and backend layers using tools like Playwright, Selenium, Appium, JUnit/TestNG, RestAssured, and Postman is essential. Strong software development experience in Java, JavaScript/TypeScript, or Python is also required. Demonstrated success in building or scaling test automation frameworks in modern development environments, integrating automated testing into CI/CD pipelines, and understanding performance testing strategies and tools are important skills for this role. Experience in cloud-native environments, familiarity with observability and monitoring tools, working in regulated environments such as FinTech, and understanding of contract testing, chaos engineering, and modern reliability practices are preferred skills. In summary, as a Senior SDET Manager, you will play a crucial role in ensuring the quality and performance of software delivery through effective leadership, mentorship, and collaboration with cross-functional teams.,