SDET Lead

The Opportunity

A high-growth technology organisation in Abu Dhabi is hiring an SDET Lead to own quality engineering across its platforms on a JavaScript/TypeScript stack. The role builds and leads a team that treats testing as engineering: Playwright-led automation across UI, API, data and integration layers, real performance engineering, and agentic testing where AI agents generate, execute and maintain tests. You understand how systems and infrastructure are built and challenge developers on design and risk early, so the test strategy fits the architecture.

Location: Abu Dhabi, hybrid / onsite, full time

Reports to: Head of Engineering / Head of QA

Team: SDET team to be built and led, working with product, developers, DevOps and security

What You Will Own

• Test strategy and architecture engagement: review architecture and design documents, probe failure modes, dependencies, data flows, scalability and security, and turn the answers into a risk-based test strategy. Define the test pyramid per product with clear ownership between developers and SDETs, and join design reviews and sprint planning as a quality voice, not a gate at the end.


• Full stack automation (TypeScript/Node.js): own and evolve the Playwright framework, automate APIs and services with schema validation and GraphQL coverage, and implement consumer-driven contract testing, service mocking and test data management for microservice environments. Support front-end teams with component and unit testing, cover mobile and cross-browser, and integrate everything into CI/CD with quality gates, flaky-test quarantine and reporting.


• Performance engineering: design workload models from real usage data and build and maintain load, stress, soak, spike and scalability tests as code (k6 preferred, JMeter where in use), run in CI/CD with performance gates. Diagnose bottlenecks across application, database, cache, queue and network layers, define SLOs and performance budgets, and validate resilience and capacity, including autoscaling, failover and graceful degradation.


• Observability-driven testing: use metrics, logs and distributed traces to correlate test runs with system behaviour, build dashboards and alerts that show test results and system health together, and feed production incident learnings back into test scenarios.


• Agentic and AI-assisted testing: build and evaluate agentic workflows using Playwright MCP and LLM APIs for test generation, exploratory testing, self-healing locators and failure triage. Define guardrails for human review, determinism, traceability, cost control and data handling, validate AI-enabled product features, and report honestly on measurable outcomes.


• Leadership: lead, mentor and hire SDETs, set coding standards, code review practices and career paths, and partner with product, developers, DevOps and security on quality metrics and release readiness. Own defect trend analysis, root cause reviews and continuous improvement.


• Governance: ensure test environments and data comply with UAE data protection regulation and internal policy, with no production PII in test assets, load test data or agent prompts. Align with PCI DSS where payment flows are in scope, and manage test credentials and secrets through approved vaults.

What You Bring

• 8+ years in software testing and quality engineering, including 3+ years leading SDETs or automation teams.


• Expert TypeScript/JavaScript and Node.js, with strong async patterns, typing and clean framework design.


• Deep, hands-on Playwright experience at framework level (not just scripting), including CI scaling.


• 2+ years of hands-on performance engineering with k6 or JMeter, including designing workload models, building scripts from scratch, analysing results and driving fixes. Experience limited to running existing scripts does not meet this bar.


• Working knowledge of infrastructure and its effect on performance: cloud platforms, containers and Kubernetes, load balancers, databases and indexing, caching, queues, connection pools and network behaviour.


• Hands-on observability experience (Datadog, Grafana/Prometheus, OpenTelemetry or similar) to find root causes during test runs.


• Experience with Jest or Vitest, API testing in JavaScript, and Pact or equivalent contract testing.


• Solid grasp of distributed architecture: microservices, REST/GraphQL, message queues and event streaming, and the ability to read architecture diagrams and code and question design decisions with evidence.


• CI/CD experience (GitHub Actions, Azure DevOps or Jenkins), Docker and test environment automation.


• Practical experience applying LLMs or agents in testing, with a clear view of their limits.


• Strong communication, credible with senior developers, architects and platform engineers.


• Nice to have: Gatling, Locust or Lighthouse; chaos and resilience tooling; infrastructure as code; security testing basics (OWASP Top 10, DAST/SAST); data quality testing on Databricks or similar; React/Next.js or Angular and Node back-ends; regulated-sector background; ISTQB or cloud certifications.