Director, Software Engineering: Software Development Test (SDET)

What You'll Do:

Technology leader responsible for defining, driving and scaling enterprise-wide test automation, quality engineering practices. This role will architect and implement advanced automation solutions across applications, data and platforms, enable adoption of best practices, and establish the governance, metrics and tools. The role combines technical expertise with strong leadership and stakeholder collaboration skills skills to deliver next generation automation infusing AI capabilities.

Primary Duties and Responsibilities:

To perform this job successfully, an individual must be able to perform each primary duty satisfactorily.

• Define and execute the enterprise automation strategy aligned with business and technology modernization goals.

• Drive adoption of automation in all phases of testing including automated regression and smoke tests to improve quality and accelerate testing.

• Implement automated quality gates, pre/post deployment checks and shift-left testing.

• Architect scalable, reusable automation frameworks covering UI, API, microservices, data pipelines, Kafka/event driven systems, batch jobs, reports and databases.

• Define standards for BDD, contract testing, CI/CD integration, synthetic data generation and environment-agnostic test automation.

• Establish tagging and traceability across automation framework, Jira, Confluence, Test management tools, CI/CD pipelines and Splunk.

• Introduce and scale synthetic test data management, environment/service virtualization for complex integration testing.

• Envision and implement AI/ML and Generative AI infused solutions for test case generation, test data generation, automation script generation and quality insights.

• Build quality engineering and automation center of excellence to drive training, reusable asset libraries and knowledge management artifacts.

• Partner with development, product, DevOps and Platform Engineering leaders to embed automation into all stages of SDLC.

• Define, monitor and report KPIs/OKRs for automation outcomes to executives and product owners.

• Drive compliance with industry standards, regulatory requirements, and audit readiness across automation and QE practices.

Supervisory Responsibilities:

Manages a team of people managers, individual contributors, and consultants/contractors

Qualifications:

The requirements listed are representative of the knowledge, skill, and/or ability required.  Reasonable accommodations may be made to enable individuals with disabilities to perform the primary functions.

• Minimum ten (15) years’ of IT experience with ten (10)+ years in test automation.

• Proven track record of leading enterprise-scale automation initiatives in complex, distributed environments (microservices, cloud, batch applications, data, MQ, Kafka event driven systems).

• Hands-on experience with service virtualization, synthetic test data management.

• Strong hands-on expertise in testing and test automation tools and frameworks including Jira, BDD, Selenium, Cucumber, REST-assured, JMeter, Playwright.

• Strong programming experience in Java and Python.

• Deep understanding of DevOps, CI/CD pipelines (Jenkins, Harness, GitHub), cloud platforms (AWS, Azure) and containerized environments (Kubernetes, Docker).

• Experience with Kafka/event-driven testing, large data set validations

• Experience with Agile development processes for enterprise software solutions

• Strong background in metrics-driven quality reporting and risk-based decision making.

• Strong organizational leadership skills

• Ability to manage multiple, competing priorities and make decisions quickly

• Knowledgeable about industry trends, best practices, and change management

• Strong communication skills with the ability to communicate and interact with a variety of internal/external customers, coworkers, and Executive Management

• Strong work ethic, hands-on, detail oriented with a customer service mentality

• Team player, self-driven, motivated, and able to work under pressure

• Results-oriented and demonstrated record of developing initiatives that impact productivity

Technical Skills:

• Proficiency with modern quality engineering tools including Jira, Jenkins, automation frameworks, test management tools.

• Software QA methodologies (requirements analysis, test planning, functional testing, usability testing, performance testing, etc.)

• Familiarity with AI/ML/GenAI Solutions in QE.