SDET & Quality Engineering Lead

About This Role

SDET & Quality Engineering Lead

Project description

This role serves as a Software Development Engineer in Test (SDET) with a primary focus on designing and building robust test frameworks, enhancing system testability, and actively contributing to core product code to uphold the highest standards of product quality. You will lead the end-to-end quality strategy for an Event-Driven Architecture (EDA) and a low-latency trading platform leveraging Solace messaging and Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS). This is a hands-on leadership position where you will define quality standards, mentor engineering teams, and deliver comprehensive, audit-ready evidence to meet the requirements of regulated markets.

Responsibilities

• Own the test automation strategy and governance:
• define a shift-left test strategy covering unit, integration, contract, end-to-end, performance, security, and resiliency testing.
• establish quality gates including defects, coverage, flakiness budgets, and performance service-level objectives, along with release criteria.
• implement a shift-left testing model ensuring traceability from requirements to tests, results, and evidence.
• Architect and develop reusable testing frameworks and internal developer tools:
• enhance product code testability through dependency injection, mocks, instrumentation, logging, trace IDs, and resilience hooks.
• provide libraries and utilities for API, messaging, database, and contract testing.
• standardize test data management with deterministic fixtures and support parallel and ephemeral test execution patterns.
• Event-driven architecture (EDA) testing:
• develop automated contract-validation tools and contribute to code ensuring schema evolution and compatibility in event-driven architecture testing.
• assert ordering, idempotency, message delivery semantics, replay, dead-letter queue handling, and key deduplication.
• prove back-pressure, throttling, and consumer lag under bursty loads; perform chaos testing on broker clusters.
• enforce schema and contract gates in CI/CD pipelines to prevent changes before promotion.
• Pipelines, environments & observability:
• embed test suites into Azure DevOps (build -> deploy -> smoke -> regression -> perf) with mandatory gates (coverage, static analysis, compliance, and performance).
• Orchestrate tests on AKS with Docker and ephemeral environments.
• Validate trace IDs across services; validate Application Insights and Dynatrace signals in assertions.
• Performance:
• baselines latency/throughput; run JMeter/LoadRunner for spike/soak/failover; collaborate on capacity tuning

Skills

Must have

• 8+ years of experience as a SDET
• Proven delivery of pipeline-integrated .NET automation frameworks and regulated-market audits.
• Deep hands-on experience with messaging systems (Solace, Kafka, or RabbitMQ) and distributed system testing
• Proven ability to build test frameworks and CI/CD quality gates for event-driven architectures
• Performance and load testing experience (JMeter, LoadRunner, or equivalent)
• Familiarity with observability tooling (Dynatrace, OpenTelemetry, Datadog)
• Strong C#
• Financial services or trading platform experience preferred

Nice to have

• FIX conformance via QuickFIX/N simulators; schema registry tooling
• ISTQB Advanced/CSTE, Azure Fundamentals / Azure DevOps Engineer
• Finance certs (CFA/FRM), Agile/Scrum experience