Director of Automation and SDET

***Position is bonus eligible***

Prestigious Financial Institution is currently seeking a Director of Automation and SDET with AI/ML experience. Candidate will be responsible for defining, driving and scaling enterprise-wide test automation, quality engineering practices. This role will architect and implement advanced automation solutions across applications, data and platforms, enable adoption of best practices, and establish the governance, metrics and tools. The role combines technical expertise with strong leadership and stakeholder collaboration skills to deliver next generation automation infusing AI capabilities.

Responsibilities:

Define and execute the enterprise automation strategy aligned with business and technology modernization goals.

Drive adoption of automation in all phases of testing including automated regression and smoke tests to improve quality and accelerate testing.

Implement automated quality gates, pre/post deployment checks and shift-left testing.

Architect scalable, reusable automation frameworks covering UI, API, microservices, data pipelines, Kafka/event driven systems, batch jobs, reports and databases.

Define standards for BDD, contract testing, CI/CD integration, synthetic data generation and environment-agnostic test automation.

Establish tagging and traceability across automation framework, Jira, Confluence, Test management tools, CI/CD pipelines and Splunk.

Introduce and scale synthetic test data management, environment/service virtualization for complex integration testing.

Envision and implement AI/ML and Generative AI infused solutions for test case generation, test data generation, automation script generation and quality insights.

Build quality engineering and automation center of excellence to drive training, reusable asset libraries and knowledge management artifacts.

Partner with development, product, DevOps and Platform Engineering leaders to embed automation into all stages of SDLC.

Define, monitor and report KPIs/OKRs for automation outcomes to executives and product owners.

Drive compliance with industry standards, regulatory requirements, and audit readiness across automation and QE practices.

Manages a team of people managers, individual contributors, and consultants/contractors

Qualifications:

Minimum ten (15) years’ of IT experience with ten (10)+ years in test automation.

Proven track record of leading enterprise-scale automation initiatives in complex, distributed environments (microservices, cloud, batch applications, data, MQ, Kafka event driven systems).

Hands-on experience with service virtualization, synthetic test data management.

Strong hands-on expertise in testing and test automation tools and frameworks including Jira, BDD, Selenium, Cucumber, REST-assured, JMeter, Playwright.

Strong programming experience in Java and Python.

Deep understanding of DevOps, CI/CD pipelines (Jenkins, Harness, GitHub), cloud platforms (AWS, Azure) and containerized environments (Kubernetes, Docker).

Experience with Kafka/event-driven testing, large data set validations

Experience with Agile development processes for enterprise software solutions

Strong background in metrics-driven quality reporting and risk-based decision making.

Strong organizational leadership skills

Ability to manage multiple, competing priorities and make decisions quickly

Knowledgeable about industry trends, best practices, and change management

Strong communication skills with the ability to communicate and interact with a variety of internal/external customers, coworkers, and Executive Management

Strong work ethic, hands-on, detail oriented with a customer service mentality

Team player, self-driven, motivated, and able to work under pressure

Results-oriented and demonstrated record of developing initiatives that impact productivity

Technical Skills:

Proficiency with modern quality engineering tools including Jira, Jenkins, automation frameworks, test management tools.

Software QA methodologies (requirements analysis, test planning, functional testing, usability testing, performance testing, etc.)

Familiarity with AI/ML/GenAI Solutions in QE.

Utilizing best practices in software engineering, software test automation, test management tools, and defect tracking software

Past/Current experience of 3+ years working on a large-scale cloud native project Experience with cloud technologies and migrations using public cloud vendor preferably using cloud foundational services like AWS’s VPCs, Security groups, EC2

Education and/or Experience:

BS degree in Computer Science or Information Systems Management or a similar technical field

10+ years of experience in Quality Assurance space preferably on complex systems and large programs.