Senior SDET - Test Automation Architect

About the role : The Staff SDET role is an individual contributor and quality engineering leader within a software development scrum team. The Senior SDET guides and collaborates with a select group of SDETs and Test Engineers, covering the full scope of test automation and white-box testing. This role ensures software quality by developing robust automated tests, frameworks, and quality engineering processes.

Essential Duties & Responsibilities

Build and maintain automated test suites across UI, API, Microservices, and Database layers. Guide SDETs in one or more functional areas to optimize and stabilize these suites.

Contribute to tool analysis, proof of concepts, and recommendations supporting tool selection. Establish best practices for coding, peer reviews, Git workflow, CI / CD, and quality gates.

Participate in technical reviews with architects and developers to communicate design, requirements, and system limitations. Advocate for quality engineering standards across teams.

Conduct functional and regression testing, analyze automation results, report defects, and ensure resolution tracking. Integrate automated tests into CI / CD pipelines to enable continuous testing and deployment.

Actively engage in Agile ceremonies for mentee teams, including sprint grooming, planning, demos, retrospectives, and release meetings. Collaborate across squads to understand project requirements and architecture.

Design and document comprehensive test strategies, guidelines, SOPs, and tooling to improve test automation efficiency.

Triage customer issues and production metrics, perform root cause analysis, and advise on system hardening.

Provide mentorship and oversight to a small group of SDETs, ensuring adherence to SOPs and coding / design guidelines.

Lead maintenance of test environments and data creation to mirror staging / production configurations.

Recommended Experience & Education

Typically requires 8+ years of related experience or 6 years plus an advanced degree.

Bachelor's degree in engineering, computer science, mathematics, statistics, or related field (or equivalent experience).

Knowledge, Skills, & Qualifications

Required

• Proficiency in object-oriented programming and data structures in languages such as C#, Java, Python, or JavaScript;

familiarity with Shell and PowerShell scripting.

Expertise with web / mobile / API testing tools (e.G., Selenium, Cypress, Appium, RestAssured).

Skilled in building test automation frameworks using best practices (page-object model, data-driven, BDD) and frameworks (JUnit, NUnit, TestNG, Pytest, Cucumber).

Experience with Git workflows (Bitbucket, GitLab), build tools (Gradle, Maven), artifact management (JFrog), and CI / CD tools (GitLab, Jenkins, Bamboo, CircleCI).

Ability to create test strategies involving smoke, functional, and regression testing and optimize test case coverage.

Knowledge of Agile / DevOps methodologies including Scrum and Kanban.

Solid understanding of relational (SQL Server, Postgres) and non-relational databases (MongoDB, DynamoDB) with the ability to write complex queries and analyze database performance.

Exposure to white-box testing tools (SonarQube, JaCoCo) and performance testing tools (JMeter, Gatling).

Familiarity with API architectures (REST, GraphQL, gRPC), microservices, event-driven architectures (Kafka), Kubernetes, and service virtualization.

Strong collaboration and communication skills capable of tailoring technical information for diverse audiences.

Proficient in production troubleshooting using logs and tools like PagerDuty.

Alkami is committed to equal employment opportunity, prohibiting discrimination or harassment based on protected characteristics by law. Employment decisions are business-need based without regard to race, gender, age, disability, or other protected status. Reasonable accommodations will be provided as required