SDET Lead - Test Automation, Performance & AI-Assisted Testing

About the role

An experienced SDET Lead is sought to lead quality engineering across multiple platforms. This is a hands-on leadership role focused on scalable test automation, performance engineering, observability and AI-assisted testing. You will build and lead an SDET team, set up testing strategies aligned with the system architecture, and work closely with developers, architects, DevOps and product teams to improve software quality, reliability and release confidence.

Key responsibilities

• Define risk-based test strategies aligned with system architecture and product requirements.
• Build and evolve scalable Playwright automation frameworks using TypeScript/JavaScript and Node.js.
• Drive UI, API, integration, contract and end-to-end testing.
• Design and run performance tests with k6 or JMeter, including workload modelling, bottleneck analysis and optimization.
• Integrate automated testing and quality gates into CI/CD pipelines.
• Use observability tools, metrics, logs and distributed traces to investigate failures and performance issues.
• Develop AI-assisted and agentic testing workflows for test generation, exploratory testing, failure analysis and test maintenance.
• Lead, mentor and develop SDET engineers, and set coding standards and quality metrics.
• Collaborate with engineering and platform teams to improve resilience, scalability and release readiness.
• Ensure test data, credentials and testing environments meet security and data protection requirements.

Required profile

• 8+ years of experience in software testing and quality engineering.
• 3+ years leading SDET or test automation teams.
• Expert JavaScript/TypeScript and Node.js; deep, hands-on Playwright experience including framework development and CI scaling.
• At least 2 years of hands-on performance engineering with k6 or JMeter.
• Strong knowledge of API testing, Jest/Vitest, contract testing, microservices, REST/GraphQL and distributed architectures.
• Experience with CI/CD pipelines, Docker, cloud infrastructure and Kubernetes.
• Hands-on experience with observability platforms such as Datadog, Grafana/Prometheus or OpenTelemetry.
• Practical experience applying LLMs or AI agents to software testing.

Nice to have

• Chaos engineering, resilience testing, Gatling, Locust or Lighthouse.
• Infrastructure as code with Terraform or Bicep.
• Security testing knowledge, including OWASP Top 10.
• Real estate technology, fintech or other regulated industry experience.
• ISTQB or cloud certifications.