Senior SDET Automation Framework Architect

Role: Senior SDET Automation Framework Architect (Playwright | Selenium | API Automation | CI/CD)

Location: Pune, India (Hybrid 2 days onsite)

Experience: 610+ years

Reports to: Director of Quality Engineering

Job Type: FTE

Shift Hours: 2:00 PM to 11:00 PM

WHAT YOU'LL DO

• Own the quality bar. Define what "passing" means for client: establish written quality criteria

covering scheduling correctness, data integrity, access control, and performance that gate

production releases.

• Test the rules engine. Design and implement automated test suites covering Autoassign placement logic - student choice, teacher priority, must-attend assignments, rostered and

restricted sessions, at-risk designations, seat and room capacity, separation (contact control) rules, conflict detection, and the guarantee that manual registrations are never overwritten -

plus the edge cases around them: conflicting rules, boundary conditions, concurrent registrations at capacity limits and sign-up cutoffs, API calls that skip UI validation, and

permission boundaries.

• Gate every release. Build CI/CD quality gates that prevent regressions from reaching

production; own the pipeline configuration and ensure the quality bar is enforced, not

advisory.

• Set performance baselines. Measure and establish written performance baselines for

peak-load moments: sign-up windows opening and closing, Autoassign runs before each

client period, and attendance taking across thousands of concurrent users; define the

thresholds that constitute a performance regression.

• Cover web, mobile, and integrations. Own end-to-end coverage across web, mobile, and

integrations: student, teacher, and admin workflows; the student mobile app; email,

in-product, and push notifications; roster imports and attendance exports to the SIS; and the

shared rostering and single sign-on client runs on with client Pass.

• Build the framework. Architect and build the client automation framework: reusable libraries,

test data utilities for roster and attendance files, parallel execution, and reporting that the

whole team extends - and contribute fixes to product code where it improves testability.

• Mentor and scale. Mentor engineers on test architecture as a first-class discipline, and bring

AI-assisted tooling into how the team generates scenarios, triages failures, and scales

coverage.

• Shape architecture. Partner with your technical lead and the Distinguished Engineer on

architecture and testability decisions, and influence testing standards across teams beyond

your own squad.

• Own incidents. Join the on-call rotation and own the full incident lifecycle for quality

regressions: detection, diagnosis, resolution, and retrospective.

SKILLS & REQUIREMENTS

Must-Have

• Test framework architecture - designing automation frameworks from scratch (page object or

screenplay patterns, BDD where it fits, parallel execution, reporting) that other engineers

extend. You build the platform, not just the scripts.

• Test automation (SDET-level) - Playwright, Cypress, or Selenium for UI plus API-level

automation (REST, contract testing). Must automate business-rule behavior - placement

decisions, capacity and eligibility rules, state transitions - not just UI interaction tests.

• CI/CD quality gates - integrating test suites into pipelines; defining and enforcing regression

gates for a multi-tenant product used daily by 1,000+ schools. At this level you own the

definition of the bar, not just the tests that check it.

• Rules-engine and data-integrity testing - designing deterministic test data and fixtures for

scheduling, allocation, or eligibility logic; building data utilities that validate rosters,

registrations, and attendance across CSV/XML imports, exports, and concurrent edits.

• Strong programming - JavaScript/TypeScript, Java, or Python at production quality (TypeScript

strongly preferred). Your test code is held to the same review standard as product code.

• Technical communication - ability to produce written quality criteria, test strategy and

edge-case documentation, and performance baseline documents that the implementation

team, engineering manager, PM, Support, and leadership can act on.

• Education & experience - Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or a related technical field,

with 6 to 10+ years of hands-on SDET / test automation experience.

Strongly Preferred

• Performance & concurrency testing - k6, JMeter, Gatling, or Locust; modeling burst traffic

(thousands of users acting in the same minute) and catching race conditions at capacity

limits and sign-up cutoffs.

• AI-assisted test engineering - using AI tools to generate test scenarios, triage failures, or scale

framework adoption across teams.

• Security & access-control testing - role-based permissions (student / teacher / admin),

multi-tenant data isolation between districts, and student data privacy expectations.

Nice to Have

• Mobile test automation - Appium, Maestro, Detox, or similar for iOS and Android; push

notification and device-fragmentation coverage.

• Integration testing - SIS data import/export, rostering sync, single sign-on, and notification

delivery (email, in-product, push).

• K-12 EdTech domain - understanding of bell schedules, advisory periods, MTSS intervention

tiers, and how districts manage SIS data helps design realistic test scenarios.

WHO YOU ARE

• You test the edge cases, not just the happy path. You test the ways the system should fail and

doesn't, and you document those cases so the implementation team designs against them.

• You have built automation frameworks from the ground up - not just inherited them - and

other engineers have built on what you designed.

• You treat test architecture as a first-class engineering discipline. A feature without a

regression suite is not finished - and you enforce that standard through CI/CD gates, not just

code review comments.

• You define what "quality" means on a product that decides where students are supposed to

be, and produce written criteria that hold the codebase to that standard across every

engineer and every release.

• You are hands-on at a senior level - you still write the framework code, and you raise the bar

for everyone who writes tests after you. Experience shipping product feature code is a

bonus, not a requirement.

• Your edge-case documentation and performance baselines are used by the implementation

team to make better architecture decisions. Your influence extends past your own work.

• You own your area end to end with minimal oversight, and you resolve ambiguity in

requirements and design tradeoffs instead of waiting for a fully formed spec.