SDET Lead

Amana Talent L.L.C-FZ; Abu Dhabi; On-site; AED 420,000 - 560,000; Full time

Job summary

Amana Talent L.L.C-FZ is seeking an experienced SDET lead to design and drive a comprehensive test strategy across microservices and front-end systems. You will advance Playwright automation, API testing, and observability-driven processes while collaborating with product, security, and DevOps teams.

You will mentor SDETs, implement AI-assisted testing workflows, and ensure robust performance and quality gates throughout CI/CD.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of experience in software testing and quality engineering.

Responsibilities

• 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.
• Own and evolve Playwright framework, automate APIs and services, and ensure CI/CD integration with quality gates.

Skills

JavaScript/TypeScript

Playwright

Performance testing

CI/CD

Observability tools

Contract testing

Docker/Kubernetes

Leadership in SDET

Test automation architecture

API testing

Gatling

Tools

Jest

Vitest

Pact

OpenTelemetry

Datadog

Grafana/Prometheus

Job description

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

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.