Senior SDET

About this job

Smallest is building next-generation AI infrastructure and voice technology, working across speech, LLMs, and real-time AI systems to power intelligent products at scale. As a Senior SDET at Smallest in Bengaluru, you will act as a hands-on individual contributor owning quality engineering across backend systems. Your main focus will be designing automation frameworks, conducting functional and performance testing, and ensuring that APIs and services stay reliable as system complexity increases. A normal day involves designing scalable automation frameworks, building reusable test utilities, executing load and stress tests, defining performance benchmarks, analyzing failures using logs and metrics, and collaborating closely with engineering, product, and infrastructure teams to resolve bottlenecks and prevent production risks before release.

Responsibilities

• Own functional, integration, end-to-end, and performance testing for backend services and APIs.
• Design, build, and maintain scalable automation frameworks from the ground up.
• Automate testing across a multi-service, multi-tenant platform and validate tenant isolation and data integrity.
• Design and execute load, stress, spike, scalability, and endurance tests while defining performance benchmarks.
• Identify performance bottlenecks and collaborate with backend and infrastructure engineers to resolve them.
• Integrate functional and performance test suites into CI/CD pipelines.
• Analyze failures using logs, metrics, and traces to distinguish product defects from environment issues.
• Improve test coverage, quality gates, and overall QA processes across the organization.

Requirements

• 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 in multi-service architectures.
• Hands-on experience with performance-testing tools such as k6, JMeter, Gatling, or Locust.
• Strong programming or scripting skills in at least one language like Python, Java, JavaScript/TypeScript, or Go.
• Experience integrating automated tests into CI/CD systems.
• Strong understanding of testing fundamentals, SDLC, STLC, and defect-management practices.

Good to have

• 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.

Who should apply

This role suits experienced quality engineering professionals with a strong background in test automation and performance testing for backend systems. Candidates should have at least 4 years of experience and possess strong programming skills in languages like Python, Java, JavaScript/TypeScript, or Go. It is ideal for independent contributors who enjoy working in high-ownership environments, collaborating with cross-functional teams, and building scalable testing frameworks from scratch. The posting does not mention whether freshers can apply.

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