Staff, Software Engineer in Test

About the job

About the role :

The Staff SDET role is an individual contributor and quality engineering leader within a software development scrum team. The Senior SDET guides and collaborates with a select group of SDETs and Test Engineers, covering the full scope of test automation and white-box testing. This role ensures software quality by developing robust automated tests, frameworks, and quality engineering processes.

Essential Duties & Responsibilities

• Build and maintain automated test suites across UI, API, Microservices, and Database layers. Guide SDETs in one or more functional areas to optimize and stabilize these suites.
• Contribute to tool analysis, proof of concepts, and recommendations supporting tool selection. Establish best practices for coding, peer reviews, Git workflow, CI/CD, and quality gates.
• Participate in technical reviews with architects and developers to communicate design, requirements, and system limitations. Advocate for quality engineering standards across teams.
• Conduct functional and regression testing, analyze automation results, report defects, and ensure resolution tracking. Integrate automated tests into CI/CD pipelines to enable continuous testing and deployment.
• Actively engage in Agile ceremonies for mentee teams, including sprint grooming, planning, demos, retrospectives, and release meetings. Collaborate across squads to understand project requirements and architecture.
• Design and document comprehensive test strategies, guidelines, SOPs, and tooling to improve test automation efficiency.
• Triage customer issues and production metrics, perform root cause analysis, and advise on system hardening.
• Provide mentorship and oversight to a small group of SDETs, ensuring adherence to SOPs and coding/design guidelines.
• Lead maintenance of test environments and data creation to mirror staging/production configurations.

Recommended Experience & Education

• Typically requires 8+ years of related experience or 6 years plus an advanced degree.
• Bachelor's degree in engineering, computer science, mathematics, statistics, or related field (or equivalent experience).

Knowledge, Skills, & Qualifications

Required

• Proficiency in object-oriented programming and data structures in languages such as C#, Java, Python, or JavaScript; familiarity with Shell and PowerShell scripting.
• Expertise with web/mobile/API testing tools (e.g., Selenium, Cypress, Appium, RestAssured).
• Skilled in building test automation frameworks using best practices (page-object model, data-driven, BDD) and frameworks (JUnit, NUnit, TestNG, Pytest, Cucumber).
• Experience with Git workflows (Bitbucket, GitLab), build tools (Gradle, Maven), artifact management (JFrog), and CI/CD tools (GitLab, Jenkins, Bamboo, CircleCI).
• Ability to create test strategies involving smoke, functional, and regression testing and optimize test case coverage.
• Knowledge of Agile/DevOps methodologies including Scrum and Kanban.
• Solid understanding of relational (SQL Server, Postgres) and non-relational databases (MongoDB, DynamoDB) with the ability to write complex queries and analyze database performance.
• Exposure to white-box testing tools (SonarQube, JaCoCo) and performance testing tools (JMeter, Gatling).
• Familiarity with API architectures (REST, GraphQL, gRPC), microservices, event-driven architectures (Kafka), Kubernetes, and service virtualization.
• Strong collaboration and communication skills capable of tailoring technical information for diverse audiences.
• Proficient in production troubleshooting using logs and tools like PagerDuty.