SDET Lead

• 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.

Desired Candidate Profile

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. Employment Type Full-time

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