Software Development Engineer III
Summary
Software Development Engineer III (DRE/SDET) at Esper in Bengaluru who designs validation strategies and builds API/UI automation frameworks (Playwright, Selenium), integrates automated checks into PR/CI-CD workflows, debugs failures across backend, databases, and devices, and uses AI tools to accelerate testing and developer tooling.
What You'll Be Doing
- Understand product requirements, architecture, and customer workflows and design effective validation strategies.
- Build and scale API/UI automation frameworks and reusable engineering guardrails across DRE.
- Develop automated coverage for new product features, customer workflows, regressions, and production issues.
- Perform release validation and continuously reduce the manual effort required for releases.
- Move validation earlier in the SDLC by integrating automated checks into development, PR, and CI/CD workflows.
- Build developer tooling that provides fast and actionable feedback to engineering teams.
- Expand automation coverage across Windows, Linux, Airwave, and other areas with limited current coverage.
- Convert customer and requirement scenarios into reusable automated validation contracts.
- Investigate failures across UI, APIs, backend services, logs, databases, containers, devices, and environments.
- Debug backend/cloud issues and contribute code fixes when required.
- Use AI coding tools and agents to accelerate development, automation, test generation, debugging, failure analysis, and maintenance.
- Improve the reliability, maintainability, and execution speed of existing automation.
- Contribute to Hard Commits, P3s, PFRs, backend/cloud engineering, and other DRE priorities as required.
- Partner with Engineering, Product, and Release teams to improve release confidence and developer velocity.
Skills & Abilities (Required)
3–5 years of relevant software testing/automation engineering experience.
- Strong software testing fundamentals and ability to design comprehensive validation strategies.
- Strong programming fundamentals in Java, Python, JavaScript/TypeScript, Go, or equivalent.
- Hands-on API testing and API automation experience.
- Hands-on UI automation experience using Playwright, Selenium, or equivalent.
- Experience designing/building reusable automation frameworks or test infrastructure.
- Good understanding of backend systems, APIs, databases, asynchronous processing, retries, queues, and failure handling.
- Ability to read, debug, modify, and test existing backend code.
- Strong debugging/RCA skills across application, API, backend, logs, database, automation, and environment layers.
- Experience integrating automated validation into PR and CI/CD workflows.
- Git/GitHub and modern software-development workflow experience.
- Ability and willingness to use AI-assisted development tools as part of day-to-day engineering.
- Strong ownership, problem-solving, and communication skills.
Bonus Points if You Have
- Hands-on backend/cloud development experience.
- Docker/Kubernetes experience.
- SQL/database debugging.
- Windows/Linux automation.
- Device-management or enterprise SaaS experience.
- Performance, reliability, scalability, or resilience testing.
- Internal developer-tooling experience.
- Observability/logging/metrics/tracing experience.
- Experience building AI/LLM/agent-assisted engineering workflows.
What We Think Makes Us Special
High ownership with direct impact on product and customer reliability.
- Quality is treated as an engineering responsibility rather than a downstream testing activity.
- Opportunity to influence how validation is built into the entire development lifecycle.
- Work across testing, automation, backend/cloud, device workflows, and developer tooling.
- AI-first engineering environment with opportunities to use AI for real development and quality problems.
- Ability to build reusable systems and guardrails consumed by multiple engineering teams.
- Direct impact on release confidence and engineering velocity.