SDET Lead

1. Test Strategy & Architecture Engagement • Review architecture and design documents, assess failure modes, dependencies, data flows, scalability, and security, and translate findings into risk-based test strategies. • Define the test pyramid across unit, component, contract, API, UI, end-to-end, and non-functional testing, establishing clear ownership between developers and SDETs. • Participate in design reviews and sprint planning to embed quality considerations early in the development lifecycle. 2. Full-Stack Automation (TypeScript/Node.js) • Own and evolve the Playwright framework, including abstractions, fixtures, API-assisted setup, parallel and sharded execution, and trace/video diagnostics. • Automate APIs and services using Playwright API testing or Supertest, with schema validation through OpenAPI, Zod, or equivalent tools, including GraphQL coverage. • Implement consumer-driven contract testing using Pact JS, service mocking through MSW or WireMock, and test data management for microservice environments. • Support front-end teams with component and unit testing using Vitest/Jest and Testing Library. • Implement mobile and cross-browser coverage using Playwright emulation and Appium/WebdriverIO where native testing is required. • Integrate automated testing into CI/CD pipelines with quality gates, flaky-test quarantine, and reporting through Allure, Playwright HTML reports, or dashboards. 3. Performance Engineering • Design workload models based on real usage data, including user journeys, concurrency, think time, data volumes, peak demand, and growth scenarios. • Build and maintain load, stress, soak, spike, and scalability tests as version-controlled code, preferably using k6 or JMeter. • Integrate performance testing into CI/CD pipelines and establish performance gates. • Diagnose performance bottlenecks across application, database, cache, queue, and network layers, providing evidence-based findings to development and platform teams. • Collaborate with DevOps on test infrastructure, distributed load generation, containerised runners, production-like environments, and cost optimisation. • Define service-level objectives (SLOs) and performance budgets with product and engineering teams, tracking regressions across releases. • Validate resilience and capacity, including autoscaling, failover, rate limiting, connection pools, timeout configurations, and graceful degradation. 4. Observability-Driven Testing • Use metrics, logs, and distributed traces through Datadog, OpenTelemetry, or equivalent tools to correlate test runs with system behaviour. • Build dashboards and alerts that provide visibility into test results and system health. • Incorporate lessons from production incidents into test scenarios and monitoring improvements. 5. Agentic & AI-Assisted Testing • Build and evaluate agentic workflows using Playwright MCP and LLM APIs for test generation, exploratory testing, self-healing locators, failure triage, and test maintenance. • Establish guardrails covering human review, determinism, traceability, cost control, and data handling. • Validate AI-enabled product features by testing non-deterministic outputs and prompt regressions using evaluation datasets and tools such as promptfoo or equivalents. • Measure outcomes, including coverage, defect escape rates, and maintenance effort saved, and report objectively on the effectiveness of AI-assisted approaches. 6. Leadership • Lead, mentor, and recruit SDETs, establishing coding standards, code review practices, and career development paths. • Partner with product, development, DevOps, and security teams on quality metrics and release readiness. • Own defect trend analysis, root cause reviews, and continuous improvement initiatives. 7. Governance & Compliance • Ensure test environments and data comply with UAE Personal Data Protection Law (PDPL) and internal policies, with no production personally identifiable information (PII) in test assets, load-test data, or AI agent prompts. • Where payment flows are in scope, ensure testing activities align with PCI DSS requirements. • Manage test credentials and secrets through approved vaults, ensuring they are never stored in source repositories or exposed to AI agent contexts. Must-Have Qualifications • 8+ years of experience in software testing and quality engineering, including 3+ years leading SDET or automation teams. • Expert-level JavaScript/TypeScript and Node.js skills, including asynchronous programming, strong typing, and clean framework design. • Deep, hands-on Playwright experience at framework level, including CI scaling and execution optimisation. • At least 2 years of hands-on performance engineering experience using k6 or JMeter, including workload modelling, building scripts from scratch, analysing results, and driving performance improvements. Experience limited to running existing scripts is insufficient. • Working knowledge of infrastructure and its impact on performance, including cloud platforms, containers, Kubernetes, load balancers, databases and indexing, caching, queues, connection pools, and network behaviour. • Hands-on experience with observability tools such as Datadog, Grafana/Prometheus, OpenTelemetry, or equivalents to identify root causes during test execution. • Experience with Jest or Vitest, JavaScript-based API testing, and Pact or equivalent contract-testing tools. • Strong understanding of distributed architectures, including microservices, REST/GraphQL APIs, message queues, and event streaming. • Proven ability to interpret architecture diagrams and code, challenge design decisions, and support recommendations with evidence. • Experience with CI/CD platforms such as GitHub Actions, Azure DevOps, or Jenkins, as well as Docker and test environment automation. • Practical experience applying LLMs or AI agents in testing, with a clear understanding of their limitations. • Strong communication skills and the ability to engage credibly with senior developers, architects, and platform engineers. Nice-to-Have Qualifications • Experience with Gatling, Locust, Lighthouse, chaos engineering, or resilience-testing tools. • Infrastructure-as-code experience using Terraform, Bicep, or equivalent tools, with an understanding of cost-efficient test infrastructure. • Basic security testing knowledge, including OWASP Top 10 and DAST/SAST integration. • Experience with data quality testing on Databricks or similar platforms. • Familiarity with React/Next.js or Angular, and Node.js back-end frameworks such as NestJS or Express. • Experience in real estate technology, proptech, fintech, or other regulated sectors. • ISTQB or relevant cloud certifications. What Success Looks Like in the First 12 Months • A documented, architecture-aligned test strategy for each core platform. • Reliable Playwright test suites integrated into CI/CD with effective quality gates and low flakiness. • Established performance baselines, SLOs, and automated performance gates for critical user journeys. • Identification and resolution of at least one significant performance bottleneck through test-driven analysis. • Test executions correlated with observability data to accelerate diagnosis and resolution. • An operational agentic testing capability with measurable results. • Reduced defect escape rates and shorter regression cycles. • A strong, growing SDET team with clear engineering standards and development pathways.