Technical Engineering Manager, SDET

Alkymi

full-time

Posted on: 8/20/2025

Location: 🇺🇸 United States

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💰 $113,942 - $170,912 per year

SeniorLead

AWSCloudDistributed SystemsGrafanaJavaJavaScriptJenkinsJUnitMicroservicesPythonSeleniumTypeScript

About the role

Lead, coach, and grow a team of SDETs focused on full-stack automation (Web, Mobile, API).
Architect and contribute to test automation frameworks, tools, and libraries to improve velocity, maintainability, and coverage.
Actively participate in design and code reviews, and own the quality of automation deliverables for critical systems.
Write clean, maintainable, and scalable code (~20%-30% hands-on contribution expected) in alignment with best practices for automation and validation.
Drive adoption of engineering best practices: shift-left testing, quality gates, mocking, service virtualization, and risk-based testing.
Partner with development, product, DevOps, and security to define and execute on test strategies for integration, regression, exploratory, and performance testing.
Enable continuous validation by integrating tests into CI/CD pipelines using tools such as Jenkins or GitHub Actions.
Monitor key quality metrics (e.g., defect escape rate, test coverage, automation reliability) and drive data-informed decisions.
Ensure test environments, data provisioning, and automation infrastructure meet the needs of fast-moving teams.
Participate in hiring, onboarding, mentoring, and professional development of engineering talent.
Champion a culture of ownership, accountability, and engineering excellence.

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent practical experience.
8+ years of experience in quality engineering or software development, including: 2–4 years in a technical leadership or management role overseeing SDET or QA engineers.
Proficiency in one or more programming languages such as Java, JavaScript/TypeScript, or Python.
Deep experience with UI and API automation tools: Playwright, Selenium, Appium, JUnit/TestNG, RestAssured, Postman.
Demonstrated ability to design and scale automation frameworks in complex, distributed environments.
Familiarity with CI/CD tooling and infrastructure (e.g., Jenkins, GitHub Actions).
Solid understanding of software testing principles (unit, integration, system, performance) and the testing pyramid.
Effective communication, collaboration, and influence across engineering, product, and operations teams.
Preferred: Experience in cloud-native architectures and services (e.g., AWS Lambda, EKS, CloudFront).
Exposure to observability tooling and production validation strategies (e.g., Datadog, Grafana).
Experience testing distributed systems in regulated environments (e.g., FinTech), with emphasis on automated compliance validation, audit traceability, and secure test data management.
Familiarity with modern quality engineering paradigms, including contract testing for microservices, chaos engineering to assess system resilience under failure conditions, and canary deployments for safe, progressive releases in production.