Staff Software Development Engineer in Test

About the Role

Fivetran is building data pipelines to power the modern data stack for thousands of companies. As we grow, so does the need for high-confidence delivery, platform resilience, and automation that scales with product complexity.

As a Staff SDET, you’ll lead from the front– owning shared automation infrastructure, influencing release quality strategy, and driving initiatives that span teams and systems. This role sits at the intersection of hands-on engineering, architectural leadership, and org-wide quality influence.

You will architect and scale automation utilities/libraries, design and build internal tools that improve developer productivity and test efficiency, and establish testing strategies that ensure high-confidence releases across business-critical systems. You will work cross-functionally across teams and domains to influence quality culture, mentor engineers, and drive initiatives that shape how Fivetran builds and ships software. In addition, this role emphasizes leveraging AI driven solutions to accelerate testing, enhance developer productivity, and improve operational insights, making Fivetran’s quality practices smarter, faster, and more scalable.

This role requires deep technical expertise, architectural foresight, and the ability to scale impact beyond code through systems thinking, tool building, and strategic alignment.

Technologies You’ll Use

• Languages & Frameworks: Java (17+), JUnit, REST Assured, Shell scripting; Python (optional)
• Infrastructure & Tooling: Docker, Kubernetes, Terraform, Bazel, Buildkite
• Cloud & Platform: AWS, GCP, Azure
• Observability & Monitoring: Grafana, Prometheus, Datadog
• CI/CD & Automation: Jenkins, CircleCI, GitHub Actions
• Data & Testing:ELT pipelines, test automation utilities, whitebox testing strategies
• Databases: SQL and NoSQL databases (e.g., Postgres, MongoDB)

What You’ll Do

• Lead the architecture of internal tools, libraries, and utilities for test automation and benchmarking, enabling scalable quality solutions across teams and domains.
• Define and evolve quality strategies covering testability, release readiness, performance, and reliability.
• Drive cross-org quality initiatives to improve execution speed, observability, and feedback loops.
• Identify systemic risks in business-critical systems and implement robust validation strategies.
• Mentor engineers, influence design for testability, and champion best practices across the org.
• Collaborate with engineering and product leaders to align testing priorities with platform and business objectives.

Skills We’re Looking For 

• 8+ years of experience in the software industry with a focus on building test automation frameworks, tools, and infrastructure at scale.
• Experience defining and driving code quality for tests (review processes, efficiency, maintainability).
• Writes critical or common code shared across multiple teams.
• Identifies and designs fixes for critical issues concerning core parts of the product.
• Contributes to and enforces department-wide coding standards.
• Identifies major improvements in product to improve quality and resilience.
• Identifies and fixes performance, scalability, and reliability gaps in tests and test frameworks.
• Defines testing efficiency and reporting strategies.
• Defines guidelines for product releases, including quality gates and readiness criteria.
• Expert in design principles and applying them to test architecture.
• Strong knowledge of OOP (preferably Java) 
• Hands-on experience with cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, Azure).
• Experience with CI/CD systems (Buildkite, Jenkins, GitHub Actions, CircleCI), modern build tools (Bazel, Maven, Gradle), and observability platforms (New Relic, Datadog, Prometheus, Grafana).
• Strong background in infrastructure and container orchestration (Docker, Kubernetes, Temporal).
• Strong understanding of data engineering concepts, and large-scale distributed systems.
• Demonstrated ability to drive initiatives across multiple teams and influence business-critical systems.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills to support complex technical discussions.
• Knowledge of ELT pipelines, including testing data integrity, schema evolution, and pipeline reliability.
• Demonstrated ability to incorporate AI techniques to improve test efficiency, defect detection, and productivity.
• Experience evaluating and adopting emerging quality engineering practices (e.g., shift-left testing, chaos engineering, autonomous testing).

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