Note: The job is a remote job and is open to candidates in USA. Stord is a cloud-based supply chain platform that provides end-to-end commerce and logistics solutions for brands. The Engineering Manager, SDET will establish Stord’s test automation architecture, AI-assisted test generation strategy, CI-gated testing approach, and quality standards while building and leading the SDET team. The role will oversee testing across UI, API, and Kafka event-driven systems and partner with engineering and SRE teams on coverage, environments, and performance testing.
Responsibilities
- Hire the SDET team, defining and holding the technical bar rather than delegating it
- Set framework standards, tooling decisions, and technical direction before the team's habits calcify
- Establish what "tested" means at Stord before a feature reaches UAT, and hold the team accountable to it
- Own the AI-assisted test generation mandate: converting acceptance criteria and user stories directly into test scripts is the default way tests get built, not a supplementary tool
- Set the patterns and guardrails for where AI-generated tests are trustworthy versus where they need human review
- Model and enforce AI-fluent ways of working across the team you build
- Build and own the automation strategy across interactive web application (UI), API, and Kafka eventing (event-driven/async) surfaces
- Prioritize API-level integration testing first, chosen for speed to build and resilience, with UI and Kafka eventing coverage layered on as the framework matures
- Set resilience as a non-negotiable design requirement: retry/backoff patterns, deterministic test data, and explicit handling of eventual consistency for async flows, a flaky suite erodes trust faster than no automation at all
- Build regression test registers and own contract/API test tooling across services
- Wire coverage dashboards so coverage gaps are visible, not assumed
- Define load and performance test frameworks that engineering teams can apply to their own stories
- Partner with SRE on the dedicated Test environment, schema and config parity with production is an ongoing shared concern
- Co-design the longer-term move to ephemeral per-PR environments for isolated load testing and PR-level E2E validation once the Test environment and framework are stable
Skills
- You've built and owned a Playwright (or equivalent) framework from scratch, not just written tests inside one someone else designed
- You know how to wire automated tests into CI (GitHub Actions or equivalent) so they actually block bad releases instead of running as an afterthought
- You've built or led adoption of tooling that generates test coverage from specs, acceptance criteria, or user stories, and you understand where that automation breaks down and needs human judgment
- You can design test tooling that validates service contracts, not just UI flows
- You understand the specific challenges of testing asynchronous, event-driven systems (Kafka or equivalent), timing, eventual consistency, and how to build tests that don't flake because of them
- You've integrated coverage tools (Coveralls or equivalent) into a team's workflow in a way that changed behavior, not just produced a dashboard
- You're comfortable driving your own day-to-day work, and expect the same from your team, from the command line and agentic coding tools, not GUI-first
- You've hired for a technical function before and can hold a high, specific bar rather than relaxing it under time pressure
- You own outcomes, not just activities. When your team ships, you take pride. When something breaks, you take responsibility and fix the system
- You communicate clearly with engineers, PMs, and executives. You translate technical complexity into business language and vice versa
- You scale through people, not heroics. You have a history of developing team members and multiplying impact through others
- You set direction when requirements are evolving. You build alignment across teams and functions without formal authority
- You balance innovation with pragmatic delivery constraints. You know when to push for quality and when to ship
- You understand how AI coding tools work as a productivity multiplier and can guide your team's adoption while maintaining quality and independent technical judgment
- Experience standing up a test engineering or QE function from zero, including the hiring, at a company past its early scaling stage
- Load and performance testing framework design (not just running someone else's load tests)
- Direct experience partnering with SRE/infra teams on environment strategy and parity concerns
- Contributions to open-source testing frameworks or tooling
- A track record of growing SDETs or QE engineers into senior or technical leadership roles
Company Overview
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