Senior SDET

Overview

Own quality engineering for Smallest's backend APIs and services, designing and building automation frameworks and performing functional and performance testing as traffic, customers and system complexity grow. This is an individual-contributor role working closely with engineering, product and infrastructure teams.

What you'll do

• Own functional, integration, end-to-end and performance testing for backend services and APIs.
• Design, build and maintain scalable automation frameworks rather than only adding test cases to an existing framework.
• Automate testing across a multi-service, multi-tenant platform.
• Validate tenant isolation, authentication, permissions, configuration differences, data integrity and concurrent tenant activity.
• Design and execute load, stress, spike, scalability and endurance tests.
• Define performance benchmarks and acceptance criteria for latency, throughput, concurrency, reliability and error rates.
• Identify performance bottlenecks and work with backend and infrastructure engineers to resolve them.
• Test business logic, data flows, asynchronous processes, integrations and complete customer workflows.
• Build reusable test utilities, fixtures, test-data strategies and environment-management capabilities.
• Integrate functional and performance test suites into CI/CD pipelines.
• Analyse failures using logs, metrics and traces, and distinguish product defects from environment or test-framework issues.
• Identify edge cases, regressions, failure scenarios and production risks before release.
• Improve test coverage, quality gates and overall QA processes across the engineering organisation.
• Collaborate effectively with engineers while independently driving testing priorities and execution.

What you'll need

• 4+ years of experience in software quality engineering, test automation or SDET roles.
• Strong hands-on experience with both functional testing and performance testing.
• Demonstrated experience building or significantly extending an automation framework from the ground up.
• Experience testing backend APIs, distributed services and end-to-end workflows.
• Experience working with multi-service architectures.
• Hands-on experience with performance-testing tools such as k6, JMeter, Gatling or Locust.
• Ability to design realistic workload models and analyse latency percentiles, throughput, concurrency, saturation and failure rates.
• Strong programming or scripting skills in at least one language such as Python, Java, JavaScript/TypeScript or Go.
• Experience integrating automated tests into CI/CD systems.
• Working knowledge of databases, queues, caching, APIs and asynchronous workflows.
• Familiarity with logs, monitoring and observability tools for troubleshooting test failures and performance bottlenecks.
• Strong understanding of testing fundamentals, SDLC, STLC and defect-management practices.
• Ability to operate as an independent contributor while working closely with multiple engineering teams.
• Strong analytical thinking, attention to detail and clear written and verbal communication.

Nice to have

• Exposure to multi-tenant SaaS systems.
• Experience in a high-growth or product-led technology startup.
• Experience testing real-time, AI, voice, streaming or other latency-sensitive systems.
• Familiarity with Kubernetes, Docker and cloud infrastructure.
• Experience testing WebSockets, streaming APIs or event-driven architectures.
• Experience with security, resilience, failover or chaos testing.
• Experience validating SLA/SLO requirements and production performance metrics.

Details

• Location: Bengaluru.
• Employment type: Full-time, on-site.