About the job

SDET Lead – Quality Engineering (TypeScript / Playwright / Performance / AI Testing)

📍 Abu Dhabi, UAE (Hybrid)💰 Up to AED 40,000 per month tax-free + annual bonus + education allowance + full benefits

The opportunity

A large, well-funded organisation in Abu Dhabi is investing heavily in its digital platforms and wants a hands-on SDET Lead to build quality engineering from the ground up. This isn’t a “run the regression pack” role. You’ll shape test strategy from the architecture up, lead a growing team of SDETs, and help set up AI-driven testing in a real production setting.The platforms are built on a modern JavaScript/TypeScript stack with microservices, cloud infrastructure and serious scale requirements. The business wants someone who will sit in design reviews and push back on developers about risk, rather than someone who only signs off at the end.

What you’ll be doing

• Strategy and architectureWorking through architecture and design docs to find failure points, dependencies and scaling risks, then turning that into a risk-based test approach.
• Defining the right balance of unit, component, contract, API, UI, E2E and non-functional testing for each product, with clear ownership between developers and SDETs.
• Taking part in sprint planning and design sessions from the start.
• AutomationOwning and growing a Playwright framework: fixtures, API-driven setup, parallel and sharded runs, and trace and video diagnostics.
• Building API test coverage (Playwright API, Supertest) with schema validation and GraphQL coverage.
• Rolling out contract testing (Pact), service mocking and test data management across microservices.
• Supporting front-end teams with component and unit testing (Jest/Vitest, Testing Library).
• Covering cross-browser and mobile, using Appium or WebdriverIO where native coverage is needed.
• Running everything through CI/CD with quality gates, flaky-test quarantine and clear reporting.
• Performance engineeringBuilding workload models from real usage data and writing load, stress, soak and spike tests as code (k6 preferred).
• Finding the actual bottleneck, whether it sits in the app, database, cache, queue or network, and giving engineers evidence they can act on.
• Setting SLOs and performance budgets, and tracking regressions release by release.
• Testing autoscaling, failover, rate limiting and graceful degradation with the DevOps and platform teams.
• ObservabilityLinking test runs to metrics, logs and traces (Datadog, OpenTelemetry or similar) so failures get diagnosed quickly.
• Feeding lessons from production incidents back into test coverage.
• AI and agentic testingBuilding and evaluating agent-based workflows (Playwright MCP, LLM APIs) for test generation, self-healing, exploratory testing and failure triage.
• Putting sensible guardrails in place covering human review, determinism, cost and data handling.
• Testing AI-powered product features with evaluation sets and prompt regression testing.
• Measuring the results and reporting honestly on what works and what doesn’t.
• LeadershipHiring, mentoring and developing SDETs, and setting coding standards and career paths.
• Owning quality metrics, defect trends and release readiness with product, engineering and security.
• Keeping test data and environments compliant with UAE data protection and payment security standards.

What you’ll bring

• 8+ years in testing and quality engineering, including 3+ years leading SDET or automation teams.
• Expert TypeScript/JavaScript and Node.js skills, with clean, well-typed framework design.
• Deep Playwright experience at framework level, including scaling it in CI. Scripting experience alone won’t be enough.
• 2+ years of genuine performance engineering with k6 or JMeter: designing workloads, writing scripts from scratch and driving fixes. Running other people’s scripts doesn’t count.
• Solid understanding of how infrastructure affects performance, including cloud, Kubernetes, load balancers, databases, caching, queues and connection pools.
• Hands-on observability experience (Datadog, Grafana/Prometheus, OpenTelemetry).
• Jest or Vitest, JavaScript API testing and contract testing (Pact or similar).
• Strong grasp of distributed systems: microservices, REST/GraphQL, messaging and event streaming.
• CI/CD (GitHub Actions, Azure DevOps or Jenkins) and Docker.
• Practical, grounded experience applying LLMs or agents in testing.
• The confidence to challenge senior developers and architects using evidence.

Nice to have

• Gatling, Locust, Lighthouse, or chaos/resilience tooling
• Terraform or Bicep
• OWASP, DAST and SAST basics
• Data quality testing (Databricks or similar)
• React/Next.js, Angular or NestJS exposure
• Background in fintech, proptech or another regulated sector
• ISTQB or cloud certifications

What success looks like in year one

• Every core platform has a documented test strategy that fits its architecture.
• Playwright suites run reliably in CI/CD with low flakiness.
• Performance baselines and gates cover critical journeys, and at least one real bottleneck has been found and fixed.
• An agentic testing capability is in production use, with measured results.
• Fewer defects reach production, regression cycles are shorter, and the SDET team has grown with clear standards.

Interested? Apply or message me directly for a confidential conversation.