Senior Software Development Engineer in Test (SDET)

As a Senior Software Development Engineer in Test (SDET) at Startale, you will own the engineering foundations of quality across StartaleApp, a next-generation Web3 application that brings together blockchain and DeFi functionality into a single user experience. Rather than writing tests, you will design and build the testing architecture, automation frameworks, developer tooling, CI/CD integrations, and AI-powered quality systems that enable the entire engineering organization to ship quickly and confidently. You will work across frontend applications, backend services, blockchain integrations, smart contracts, and DeFi functionality to ensure correctness, reliability, and security across complex real-world Web3 flows.

What you'll do

• Design, build, and evolve the company's quality engineering platform, defining testing architecture across unit, integration, contract, API, and end-to-end testing.
• Build and maintain reusable testing frameworks, shared libraries, fixtures, and developer tooling while continuously improving the developer experience around testing and quality engineering.
• Design and implement AI-assisted quality engineering workflows throughout the software development lifecycle, building systems that leverage LLMs for automated test generation, test maintenance, failure analysis, root cause identification, and regression detection.
• Build comprehensive automated test suites covering APIs, backend services, frontend applications, blockchain interactions, and Web3 user flows, then integrate them into CI/CD pipelines with fast feedback cycles and automated quality gates.
• Optimize test execution through parallelization, intelligent test selection, caching, and infrastructure improvements, and drive automation-first engineering practices across development teams.
• Validate complex Web3 user flows involving wallets, authentication, token operations, smart contracts, and on-chain transactions, including testing transaction lifecycle and state transitions, gas estimation, insufficient balances, slippage, and network conditions.
• Design automated regression suites covering critical Web3 and DeFi functionality such as token transfers, swaps, liquidity operations, staking, and lending.
• Build and maintain containerized testing environments using Docker and modern infrastructure tooling, designing contract, integration, and end-to-end testing strategies for distributed and blockchain-based systems.
• Develop automated load, stress, endurance, and resilience testing for backend services and Web3 infrastructure, validating system behavior during degraded conditions, network failures, RPC failures, timeouts, blockchain congestion, and infrastructure outages.
• Collaborate with engineering teams to improve system observability and accelerate production issue investigation.

What you bring

• 5+ years of experience in Software Development Engineer in Test (SDET), Quality Engineering, Test Automation, or Software Engineering roles.
• Strong software engineering skills with JavaScript or TypeScript.
• Experience designing testing architecture for complex distributed systems.
• Experience building scalable automation frameworks and reusable testing libraries from scratch.
• Strong experience with modern end-to-end testing frameworks such as Playwright or Cypress.
• Strong experience testing APIs such as REST, JSON-RPC, GraphQL, or WebSocket.
• Experience integrating automated testing into CI/CD pipelines.
• Experience working with Docker and containerized testing environments.
• Experience designing API, integration, contract, and end-to-end testing strategies.
• Experience debugging distributed systems across frontend, backend, APIs, databases, and infrastructure.
• Experience designing and implementing performance, load, and reliability testing.
• Strong understanding of observability practices and production debugging.
• Experience testing complex transactional, financial, distributed, or high-throughput systems.
• Strong communication skills and the ability to collaborate effectively across engineering disciplines.

Nice to have

• Professional experience testing Web3 applications, blockchain infrastructure, or DeFi protocols.
• Strong understanding of blockchain fundamentals, smart contracts, wallets, tokens, RPCs, and on-chain transaction flows.
• Experience testing DeFi functionality such as swaps, liquidity provision, staking, lending, borrowing, or other on-chain financial protocols.
• Experience with blockchain testing frameworks, local networks, testnets, or smart contract development environments.
• Experience designing AI-assisted testing systems or integrating LLMs into QA workflows.
• Experience using AI for automated test generation, failure analysis, regression detection, code review, or test maintenance.
• Experience evaluating and integrating AI tools to improve engineering productivity.
• Experience with Kubernetes and cloud-native infrastructure.
• Experience with observability platforms such as OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, Grafana, or Datadog.

About Startale

Startale is building StartaleApp, a next-generation Web3 application that brings together blockchain and DeFi functionality, interacting with multiple blockchain networks, smart contracts, wallets, tokens, and on-chain protocols to create complex flows spanning frontend applications, backend services, blockchain infrastructure, and decentralized systems.