Principal QA Engineer (Manual , Web & API Automation)

Location: [Pune)

Experience: 5 - 7 Years

Role summary

We are seeking a highly motivated and experienced Principal QA Engineer to drive the quality strategy for our complex, web-based applications and microservices. The ideal candidate possesses a deep understanding of software testing principles, has significant hands-on experience in functional, API testing. This role is a blend of hands-on automation, architectural design, and technical leadership.

Key responsibilities

1. Strategic leadership & quality advocacy

• Define QA strategy: Architect and implement comprehensive testing strategies (functional, regression, integration) for major product features and releases, focusing on complex, interdependent web services and application components.

• Shift-left culture: Champion and enforce quality assurance best practices across the engineering organization, including participation in design reviews, code reviews, and providing feedback on testability and maintainability.

• Mentorship: Act as a technical mentor for mid-level and junior QA engineers, guiding them on automation best practices, framework usage, and advanced testing techniques.

2. Test automation & framework design

• Framework ownership: Design, implement, and maintain scalable, robust, and reusable test automation frameworks for both UI (web) and API layers (microservices) using TypeScript with Playwright and Java with Selenium.

• API specialization: Lead all aspects of API testing, including integration, contract, and end-to-end service testing using tools like Postman, REST Assured, or equivalent frameworks.

• CI/CD Integration: Integrate the automated test suites into the Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) pipeline (BitBucket) to enable continuous testing and rapid feedback on code changes.

• Test data management: Develop strategies and tools for generating, provisioning, and maintaining realistic, high-quality test data across different testing environments. 

• Test documentation maintenance: maintain documentation and artefacts within a test management platform, such as TestRail.

3. Analysis, metrics, and process improvement

• Defect triage & analysis: Drive root cause analysis (RCA) for complex, intermittent test failures, identifying systemic issues in the application or the test framework itself.

• Log analysis & troubleshooting: Employ basic Linux command-line skills to navigate server environments, inspect application logs from Java and JavaScript systems, and identify potential error patterns or anomalies to support root cause analysis.

• Test reporting & metrics: Define and track key quality metrics (e.g., defect escape rate, test coverage percentage, automation rate, test flakiness) and present actionable insights to engineering and product leadership.

• Regression optimization: Utilize advanced techniques like risk-based testing and code change analysis to optimize the regression suite, ensuring maximum defect detection with minimal execution time.

Minimum qualifications

• Experience: 5-7 years of professional experience in Quality Assurance/ Manual and Test Automation.
• Functional & systems testing: Expert-level knowledge of software testing methodologies, writing detailed test plans, and designing comprehensive, end-to-end functional test cases.
• API expertise: Proven, hands-on experience in testing RESTful and/or GraphQL APIs, including deep knowledge of HTTP protocols and status codes, and experience with dedicated API testing tools/frameworks.
• Automation proficiency: Strong hands-on experience developing and maintaining automated test scripts for complex web applications using a programming language such as Java, JavaScript.
• Web automation tools: Experience with a leading web automation tool (Selenium WebDriver, Playwright).
• Agile: Experience working within an Agile/Scrum environment with tools like Jira.
• Databases: Proficiency in writing and executing SQL queries for data validation. Basic conceptual knowledge and ability to interact with at least one NoSQL database.
• Command-line & system interaction: Strong proficiency with the Linux command line (e.g., ssh, grep, tail, curl). Ability to troubleshoot, analyze server logs (Java/JavaScript systems), and perform basic diagnostics/shell scripting. Familiarity with Docker concepts and basic commands to interact with containers via CML.
• Networking fundamentals: A solid understanding of basic networking concepts (e.g., firewalls, whitelisting, load balancing, DNS) to effectively triage issues and determine if they originate from the frontend, backend, or infrastructure layer.

Preferred qualifications (nice to have)

• Experience with Performance/Load testing tools (e.g., JMeter, LoadRunner).
• Exposure to AWS Cloud environments (or similar like Azure, or GCP).
• Experience with service virtualization or mocking tools for testing microservices.
• Basic knowledge on Kubernetes.