Lead SDET
Posted Updated
About Keka
Keka is a leading HRTech SaaS platform that helps organizations streamline people operations across HR, Payroll, Talent Management, Performance, Hiring, and Employee Experience. Our mission is to create great workplaces through intuitive, employee-centric products. At Keka, we foster a culture of ownership, transparency, and continuous learning. We empower our teams to innovate, collaborate, and solve meaningful problems while building products loved by customers.
The Role
We’re looking for a Lead SDET who can take ownership of quality engineering across the product lifecycle and help us build a strong, scalable automation ecosystem. You’ll work closely with Engineering and Product teams to shape quality strategies, identify risks early, build reliable automation frameworks, and continuously improve how we test and ship software.
This role is not just about finding defects. It’s about understanding complex systems, building the right quality practices, and enabling engineering teams to deliver better software, faster.
What You’ll Do
- Review and analyze requirements, technical designs, and architecture to identify quality risks and provide meaningful feedback early in the development lifecycle.
- Own and drive the overall quality engineering and automation strategy for the product.
- Design and evolve scalable, maintainable, and reusable automation frameworks across UI and API layers.
- Develop and execute automated tests covering functional, regression, integration, and end-to-end scenarios.
- Drive a shift-left approach by partnering closely with developers and product teams throughout planning, development, and release cycles.
- Perform API, backend, and database validation to ensure reliability, data integrity, and system behaviour.
- Identify quality gaps, bottlenecks, flaky tests, and areas of technical debt, and drive initiatives to address them.
- Integrate automated testing into CI/CD pipelines and improve the speed, reliability, and effectiveness of continuous testing.
- Define and track meaningful quality KPIs such as automation coverage, defect leakage, test effectiveness, and overall product quality.
- Investigate recurring quality issues, identify root causes, and work with engineering teams to implement long-term solutions.
- Contribute to performance and security testing initiatives and help establish effective testing practices where required.
- Establish testing standards, best practices, and processes that can be adopted consistently across engineering teams.
- Mentor SDETs and QA engineers, provide technical guidance, and help build a strong quality engineering culture.
- Stay current with emerging automation tools, testing methodologies, and engineering practices and evaluate opportunities to improve our testing ecosystem.
- Prepare and communicate quality insights, risks, metrics, and improvement initiatives to engineering and product leadership.
What You’ll Bring
- 7+ years of experience in QA, SDET, or Quality Engineering roles, with strong hands-on experience in automation.
- Strong programming skills in one or more of C#, .NET, ASP.NET, Python, Java, or JavaScript.
- Strong hands-on experience with automation tools such as Selenium, Cypress, Playwright, RestAssured, or similar.
- Strong understanding of test automation frameworks such as TestNG, JUnit, or Mocha.
- Strong experience with API testing using tools such as Postman or REST clients.
- Solid understanding of SQL, databases, and backend testing.
- Hands-on experience integrating automated testing into CI/CD pipelines, using tools such as Jenkins or GitHub Actions.
- Strong understanding of software testing principles, including white-box and black-box testing.
- Strong understanding of Agile/Scrum development practices and experience working closely with cross-functional engineering teams.
- Experience designing automation strategies and frameworks for complex products and distributed systems.
- Experience with performance and/or security testing is an added advantage.
- What We’re Looking For
- A quality engineer who thinks beyond test cases and understands the bigger engineering picture.
- Someone who can look at a product, its architecture, and its development process and identify where quality can be improved.
- You should be comfortable making technical decisions, challenging assumptions, and influencing engineering teams without relying on hierarchy.
- Strong problem-solving and analytical thinking are essential, along with the ability to communicate clearly with Engineering, Product, and leadership teams.
- We value people who take ownership, enjoy solving complex problems, and continuously look for better ways to build, test, and deliver software.
- As a Lead SDET, you’ll also play an important role in developing people around you, sharing knowledge, raising engineering standards, and building a culture where quality is owned across the team.
Education
- Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field.