Senior SDET Manager

About the Role:

The Sr. SDET Manager is a pivotal role blending strong technical depth with strategic and people leadership.

You will own the quality engineering strategy and operating model for Commerce & Payments, develop scalable quality practices, mentor SDET Managers and Leads, and drive AI-enabled approaches to improve how teams build, test, and ship software.

Why This Role Exists

The Commerce division is a new strategic division aimed at building a new pillar for our customers: the entire motion of selling their products, enabling subscriptions, configuring the right channels for distribution, sending quotes & proposals to prospective customers, accepting payments, signing contracts and more! This allows our customers to choose a single Platform (HighLevel) to perform the entire lifecycle of business starting from generating leads, tracking and converting leads to customers, selling them core communications products, enabling campaigns culminating in scaling their commercial offerings and managing it all in 1 place.

To make this a huge success it is important to understand what quality means in shipping a High quality Commerce Platform and Verticals to our Customers. This involves working with our stakeholders, internal customers and external customers judiciously and building the right quality collateral. The role of the Senior SDET Manager is to understand clearly what success means for the organization by working with Product divisions, drafting the Quality plans and tracking the health of E2E scenarios across the SDLC lifecycle, making visible the Quality dashboard to Product/Dev to enable their contributions.

We are looking for a Sr SDET Manager (Commerce) to collaborate, author, validate and attest all Commerce Releases to our internal and primarily external customers.

Responsibilities

Quality Strategy & Architecture:

• Own the end-to-end quality engineering vision, strategy, and roadmap across multiple product lines in the Commerce & Payments Organization
• Establish quality gates, release readiness criteria, and CI/CD integration into Quality.
• 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 in Commerce Context:

• Lead the org's AI adoption strategy for quality engineering - to improve coverage, productivity, and defect prediction based on our Commerce scenarios
• 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

Requirements

• 10+ years in software testing/quality engineering, including 5+ years of senior engineering leadership experience leading teams across complex products.
• Demonstrated ability to own quality strategy and reliability outcomes across multiple teams.
• 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 Backgrounds

• 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

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