Senior SDET

smallest.ai is building next-generation AI infrastructure and voice technology to power intelligent products at scale. We work across speech, LLMs and real-time AI systems, building products and infrastructure that developers and businesses rely on.

We are looking for a hands-on Senior QA Automation & Performance Engineer to own quality engineering across our backend systems. You will design and build automation frameworks, perform functional and performance testing, and help ensure that our APIs and services remain reliable as traffic, customers and system complexity grow.

This is an individual-contributor role requiring strong technical ownership and close collaboration with engineering, product and infrastructure teams.

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  Own functional, integration, end-to-end and performance testing for backend services and APIs.

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  Design, build and maintain scalable automation frameworks rather than only adding test cases to an existing framework.

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  Automate testing across a multi-service, multi-tenant platform.

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  Validate tenant isolation, authentication, permissions, configuration differences, data integrity and concurrent tenant activity.

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  Design and execute load, stress, spike, scalability and endurance tests.

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  Define performance benchmarks and acceptance criteria for latency, throughput, concurrency, reliability and error rates.

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  Identify performance bottlenecks and work with backend and infrastructure engineers to resolve them.

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  Test business logic, data flows, asynchronous processes, integrations and complete customer workflows.

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  Build reusable test utilities, fixtures, test-data strategies and environment-management capabilities.

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  Integrate functional and performance test suites into CI/CD pipelines.

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  Analyse failures using logs, metrics and traces, and distinguish product defects from environment or test-framework issues.

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  Identify edge cases, regressions, failure scenarios and production risks before release.

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  Improve test coverage, quality gates and overall QA processes across the engineering organisation.

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  Collaborate effectively with engineers while independently driving testing priorities and execution.
  

• 4+ years of experience in software quality engineering, test automation or SDET roles.

• Strong hands-on experience with both functional testing and performance testing.

• Demonstrated experience building or significantly extending an automation framework from the ground up.

• Experience testing backend APIs, distributed services and end-to-end workflows.

• Experience working with multi-service architectures; exposure to multi-tenant SaaS systems is strongly preferred.

• Hands-on experience with performance-testing tools such as k6, JMeter, Gatling or Locust.

• Ability to design realistic workload models and analyse latency percentiles, throughput, concurrency, saturation and failure rates.

• Strong programming or scripting skills in at least one language such as Python, Java, JavaScript/TypeScript or Go.

• Experience integrating automated tests into CI/CD systems.

• Working knowledge of databases, queues, caching, APIs and asynchronous workflows.

• Familiarity with logs, monitoring and observability tools for troubleshooting test failures and performance bottlenecks.

• Strong understanding of testing fundamentals, SDLC, STLC and defect-management practices.

• Ability to operate as an independent contributor while working closely with multiple engineering teams.

• Strong analytical thinking, attention to detail and clear written and verbal communication.
  

• Experience in a high-growth or product-led technology startup.

• Experience testing real-time, AI, voice, streaming or other latency-sensitive systems.

• Familiarity with Kubernetes, Docker and cloud infrastructure.

• Experience testing WebSockets, streaming APIs or event-driven architectures.

• Experience with security, resilience, failover or chaos testing.

• Experience validating SLA/SLO requirements and production performance metrics.