[Hiring] Director, SDET @HighLevel

Role Description

The Director of SDET is a pivotal role blending strong technical depth with strategic and people leadership. You will own the quality engineering vision for the organization, mentor the next generation of SDET managers and leads, and champion the adoption of AI-driven tools and practices to modernize how the organization builds, tests, and ships software.

Responsibilities:

• Quality Strategy & Architecture:
  • Own the end-to-end quality engineering vision, strategy, and roadmap across multiple product lines or business units.
  • Establish quality gates, release readiness criteria, and CI/CD processes.
  • Drive a "shift-left, shift-right" quality culture — embedding testability into design reviews and using production observability to close the loop.
  • Conduct architectural reviews across new and existing products to proactively surface scalability, reliability, and performance risks.
  • Evaluate and select tooling, frameworks, and platforms (open-source and commercial) that scale automation across teams.
• AI Adoption:
  • Lead the org's AI adoption strategy for quality engineering — building or integrating AI/ML-based testing tools to improve coverage, productivity, and defect prediction.
  • Continuously evaluate and leverage AI for all aspects of Quality Engineering ensuring quality strategy keeps pace with how product is built.
• Stakeholder & People Leadership:
  • Partner with Engineering, Product, DevOps, and Security leadership to align quality goals with business and release objectives.
  • Provide regular quality updates, metrics, and strategic recommendations to executive leadership.
  • Define, set up, and monitor key quality and productivity metrics (KPIs/OKRs).
  • Lead succession planning and mentor SDET Managers and Leads to build the next layer of quality leadership.

Qualifications

• 15+ years in software testing/quality engineering, including 5+ years in a Director or senior engineering leadership role.
• Deep expertise in test automation frameworks (Selenium, Playwright, RestAssured, etc.) and languages (Java, Python, JavaScript/TypeScript).
• Strong understanding of CI/CD pipelines (Jenkins, GitHub Actions, Harness CI/CD), containerization (Docker/Kubernetes), and cloud platforms (AWS/Azure/GCP).
• Hands-on experience building AI/ML-based testing tools that measurably improve coverage and productivity.
• Solid grounding in performance testing, security testing, and other non-functional quality attributes.
• Experience architecting test strategies for microservices, distributed systems, and mobile platforms.

Preferred Exposure

• Experience presenting AI or quality-transformation initiatives at conferences.
• Prior experience testing high-transaction SaaS platforms (CRM, Payments, Automation, Email, Fintech, or similar).
• Experience building and testing AI products using Agentic AI, including evaluation frameworks.
• Contributions to open-source testing frameworks or published thought leadership on QE/AI trends.

Key Competencies

• Quality vision and strategic execution.
• Non-functional testing (performance, security, reliability) and continuous delivery.
• Operational discipline within a fast-paced, rapid release environment.
• Stakeholder management across Engineering, Product, DevOps, and business functions.
• Team building and mentorship.
• Data-driven reporting of quality and productivity metrics to executive stakeholders.

EEO Statement

The company is an Equal Opportunity Employer. As an employer subject to affirmative action regulations, we invite you to voluntarily provide the following demographic information. This information is used solely for compliance with government recordkeeping, reporting, and other legal requirements. Providing this information is voluntary and refusal to do so will not affect your application status. This data will be kept separate from your application and will not be used in the hiring decision.

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We may use artificial intelligence (AI) tools to support parts of the hiring process, such as reviewing applications, analyzing resumes, or assessing responses and identifying potential inconsistencies or verification signals in application materials based on available information. These tools assist our recruitment team but do not replace human judgment. Final hiring decisions are ultimately made by humans. If you would like more information about how your data is processed, please contact us.