Lead, Software Development Engineer in Test (SDET)

Job Description

Role Mission:

Establish reliable and scalable quality engineering practices for StarHub’s digital platforms across mobile, web, backend and cloud-native systems. The Senior SDET will partner with engineering, product, architecture, DevOps/SRE, security and delivery teams to shift quality left, build meaningful automated quality gates, transition vendor-owned automation into sustainable in-house ownership, and provide fast, risk-based release confidence during migration, refactoring and platform modernisation initiatives.

Accountabilities:

• Take ownership of the existing test automation from vendors and establish clear quality and governance standards, documentation, CI integration, reliability and maintainability expectations so automation becomes an integral part of product engineering.
• Improve coverage, reliability and efficiency of automated tests across different platforms like web, mobile and backend
• Improve quality of releases in terms of user experience and satisfaction by ensuring testability and automated tests are treated as first class citizens in the SDLC

Responsibilities:

• Partner with developers to design and implement tests at the right layer of the test pyramid or testing trophy, including unit, component, contract, API, integration, e2e, visual, accessibility
• Setup automated quality gates across the SDLC to ensure issues are found as early as possible
• Establish and track metrics for test automation to drive improvement and accountability
• Improve test automation coverage, reliability and efficiency.
• Use AI agents and coding assistants responsibly to assist with test planning, requirements analysis, risk discovery, test design, automation development, test data generation, failure triage, coverage gap analysis, documentation and refactoring.
• Build internal tools, libraries, and platforms that make quality practices easier for both engineering and non-engineering stakeholders.
• Partner with developers to improve testability, observability, data setup, environment reliability and release confidence.
• Work with stakeholders across engineering and QE to ensure alignment on automation approaches and goals.
• Work with vendors to deliver automation solutions to the standards defined.
• Write clear technical documentation, RFCs, test plans, READMEs, onboarding guides and quality playbooks.

Areas of Impact:

• Stakeholders: QA, Engineering, Program/Delivery Management, Product
• Decision Rights: Strongly advise QA/Automation tools and license purchase, strongly advise KPIs for the test automation team
• Resources: ~10 automation resources from vendors as peers, some existing licenses for UiPath, BrowserStack

Ideal Track Record:

• Delivered automated tests (unit, integration, e2e) covering significant critical user journeys and behaviours, measurable regression improvement times in hours if not in days
• Designed, or at least significantly contributed to, and implemented automated test frameworks from scratch that have measurably improved test efficiency.
• Designed dashboards for reporting on test automation stats to stakeholders
• Integrated tests with CI/CD pipelines
• Used AI coding assistants or agents such as GitHub Copilot, Claude Code, Codex or equivalent for testing, automation, documentation, triage or quality analysis.
• Managed test environments and test automation infrastructure on cloud services like AWS, GCP, Browserstack, LambdaTest.
• Built internal tools and utilities to make testing and QE easily accessible for both engineering and non-engineering stakeholders improving productivity.