Engineering Manager, SDET

Stord; United States; On-site; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

Stord is building the first SDET leadership hire to define test automation standards across products. You’ll own the end-to-end testing strategy, set AI-assisted generation patterns, and hire and grow a team of SDETs who will implement the framework across UI, API, and event-driven surfaces.

Working with R&D leadership, you’ll shape CI/CD gatekeeping, define resilience practices, and partner with SRE to align environments.

Qualifications

• Design and own an end-to-end test framework from scratch.
• Lead CI/CD gating to block bad releases and ensure testability.
• Drive AI-assisted test generation patterns and guardrails.
• Design tooling for API/contract testing and event-driven testing.
• Create coverage dashboards and enforce visibility across teams.

Responsibilities

• Hire and build the SDET team, setting and upholding the technical bar.
• Define framework standards, tooling decisions, and strategic direction.
• Lead the AI-assisted test generation mandate across all engineering surfaces.
• Own the E2E framework across UI, API, and Kafka eventing surfaces.
• Establish regression/coverage tooling and partner with SRE for environment parity.

Skills

End-to-end test framework design

CI/CD gating

AI-assisted test generation

API/Contract testing

Event-driven testing (Kafka)

Coverage tooling

CLI-native workflow

Hiring & technical bar-setting

Tools

Playwright

GitHub Actions

Coveralls

Job description

Stord is The Consumer Experience Company, powering seamless checkout through delivery for today's leading brands. Stord is rapidly growing and is on track to double our revenue in the next 18 months. To meet and exceed this target, Stord is strategically scaling teams across the entire company, and seeking energetic experts to help us achieve our mission.

By combining comprehensive commerce-enablement technology with high-volume fulfillment services, Stord provides brands a platform to compete with retail giants. Stord manages over $10 billion of commerce annually through its fulfillment, warehousing, transportation, and operator-built software suite including OMS, Pre- and Post-Purchase, and WMS platforms. Stord is leveling the playing field for all brands to deliver the best consumer experience at scale.

With Stord, brands can increase cart conversion, improve unit economics, and drive sustained customer loyalty. Stord’s end-to-end commerce solutions combine best-in-class omnichannel fulfillment and shipping with leading technology to ensure fast shipping, reliable delivery promises, easy access to more channels, and improved margins on every order.

Hundreds of leading DTC and B2B companies like AG1, True Classic, Native, Seed Health, quip, goodr, Sundays for Dogs, and more trust Stord to deliver industry-leading consumer experiences on every order. Stord is headquartered in Atlanta with facilities across the United States, Canada, and Europe. Stord is backed by top-tier investors including Kleiner Perkins, Franklin Templeton, Founders Fund, Strike Capital, Baillie Gifford, and Salesforce Ventures.

Stord is building the operating system for modern supply chain — a unified platform handling Order Management, Warehouse Management, Transportation, and Consumer Experience for brands doing over $10B in commerce annually.

As Stord's platform has scaled, testing has stayed distributed and inconsistent — each team building its own coverage, its own patterns, its own tooling, with no shared standard for what "tested" means before a feature reaches UAT. This role exists to fix that, and to build the team that fixes it at scale. As the first SDET (Software Development Engineer in Test) leadership hire at Stord, you'll set the framework standards, the AI-assisted test generation strategy, and the CI-gated automation approach that every SDET you hire will build on, starting with a blank slate, before anyone else's habits calcify. Quality outcomes stay owned by engineering teams; you're building and leading the enablement function that lets them hit those outcomes at scale.

This role is for someone who has designed test architecture before and knows how to turn that judgment into a team, not just an individual practice. You can look at a fragmented testing landscape and see the two or three decisions that matter before the rest cascades, and you'd rather build the standard once and hire the team that scales it than keep executing inside someone else's framework. If you want the first shot at defining what test automation looks like at Stord, and the mandate to hire and grow the people who build it, this role was built for you.

Why This Role

• You're the first SDET leadership hire at Stord, the framework standards, tooling choices, and AI test infrastructure strategy are yours to set, not inherited.
• You hire the team: every SDET you bring on builds on the standards, tooling, and technical direction you establish from day one, not the other way around.
• AI-assisted test generation isn't a future roadmap item bolted onto this role, it's a core part of the mandate from day one, for you and for every engineer you hire.
• Your scope is cross-org by design: the framework and standards you set are what every embedded SDET, across every product group they land in, builds on.
• This role exists because of a leadership-level engineering quality investment, you'll have direct visibility with R&D leadership on strategy and roadmap, not just execution.
• You're building a high-bar, high-craft team on purpose, not a large one, every hiring decision is yours, and the standard is not lowered to fill a seat faster.

What You'll Do

Team Building & Technical Standards

• Hire the SDET team, defining and holding the technical bar rather than delegating it
• Set framework standards, tooling decisions, and technical direction before the team's habits calcify
• Establish what "tested" means at Stord before a feature reaches UAT, and hold the team accountable to it

AI-First Test Automation Strategy

• Own the AI-assisted test generation mandate: converting acceptance criteria and user stories directly into test scripts is the default way tests get built, not a supplementary tool
• Set the patterns and guardrails for where AI-generated tests are trustworthy versus where they need human review
• Model and enforce AI-fluent ways of working across the team you build

E2E Framework Across Three Testing Surfaces

• Build and own the automation strategy across interactive web application (UI), API, and Kafka eventing (event-driven/async) surfaces
• Prioritize API-level integration testing first, chosen for speed to build and resilience, with UI and Kafka eventing coverage layered on as the framework matures
• Set resilience as a non-negotiable design requirement: retry/backoff patterns, deterministic test data, and explicit handling of eventual consistency for async flows, a flaky suite erodes trust faster than no automation at all

Coverage & Regression Infrastructure

• Build regression test registers and own contract/API test tooling across services
• Wire coverage dashboards so coverage gaps are visible, not assumed
• Define load and performance test frameworks that engineering teams can apply to their own stories

Test Environment Partnership

• Partner with SRE on the dedicated Test environment, schema and config parity with production is an ongoing shared concern
• Co-design the longer-term move to epoxy per-PR environments for isolated load testing and PR-level E2E validation once the Test environment and framework are stable

Required

What We're Looking For

• E2E test framework design — You've built and owned a Playwright (or equivalent) framework from scratch, not just written tests inside one someone else designed.
• CI/CD test gating — You know how to wire automated tests into CI (GitHub Actions or equivalent) so they actually block bad releases instead of running as an afterthought.
• AI-assisted test generation — You've built or led adoption of tooling that generates test coverage from specs, acceptance criteria, or user stories, and you understand where that automation breaks down and needs human judgment.
• Contract and API testing — You can design test tooling that validates service contracts, not just UI flows.
• Event-driven/async testing — You understand the specific challenges of testing asynchronous, event-driven systems (Kafka or equivalent), timing, eventual consistency, and how to build tests that don't flake because of them.
• Coverage tooling and visibility — You've integrated coverage tools (Coveralls or equivalent) into a team's workflow in a way that changed behavior, not just produced a dashboard.
• CLI-native workflow — You're comfortable driving your own day-to-day work, and expect the same from your team, from the command line and agentic coding tools, not GUI-first.
• Hiring and technical bar-setting — You've hired for a technical function before and can hold a high, specific bar rather than relaxing it under time pressure.

Required Soft Skills

• Ownership & Accountability — You own outcomes, not just activities. When your team ships, you take pride. When something breaks, you take responsibility and fix the system.
• Strong Communication — You communicate clearly with engineers, PMs, and executives. You translate technical complexity into business language and vice versa.
• Delegation & Multiplication — You scale through people, not heroics. You have a history of developing team members and multiplying impact through others.
• Navigating Ambiguity — You set direction when requirements are evolving. You build alignment across teams and functions without formal authority.
• Balanced Judgment — You balance innovation with pragmatic delivery constraints. You know when to push for quality and when to ship.
• Directed AI-Assisted Development — You understand how AI coding tools work as a productivity multiplier and can guide your team's adoption while maintaining quality and independent technical judgment.

Strongly Preferred

• Experience standing up a test engineering or QE function from zero, including the hiring, at a company past its early scaling stage
• Load and performance testing framework design (not just running someone else's load tests)
• Direct experience partnering with SRE/infra teams on environment strategy and parity concerns

Nice to Have

• Contributions to open-source testing frameworks or tooling
• A track record of growing SDETs or QE engineers into senior or technical leadership roles

What Success Looks Like

• 30 days: You've audited current testing practices, proposed initial framework and tooling standards to R&D leadership, and have your hiring pipeline for the SDET team underway.
• 90 days: The framework is scaffolded and wired into CI, not yet mature. Critical order flow paths for your first embedded team are covered by automation, starting with API-level integration coverage. Your first SDET hire(s) are onboarded and ramping against the standards you set.
• 6 months: Your framework standards are adopted across every SDET you've hired. UI and Kafka eventing coverage are building on top of the API-first foundation. Resilience practices, retry/backoff, deterministic data, eventual-consistency handling, are the norm across the suite, not the exception.

About Stord

Stord is a cloud-based supply chain platform that enables brands to compete and grow through end-to-end logistics solutions. We process over $10B in commerce annually and operate across Order Management (OMS), Warehouse Management (WMS), Transportation Management (TMS), Consumer Experience, and Demand Planning. We are backed by leading investors and are rapidly scaling our engineering organization to match our ambitions.