Engineering Manager, SDET

Stord

About The Position

Stord is seeking an Engineering Manager, SDET to establish and lead the Software Development Engineer in Test (SDET) function. This role is critical for fixing distributed and inconsistent testing practices across the company. As the first SDET leadership hire, you will define framework standards, AI-assisted test generation strategy, and CI-gated automation approaches. You will build and lead a high-bar team focused on enabling engineering teams to achieve quality outcomes at scale. This position requires a leader who has designed test architecture and can translate that into a scalable team, rather than just an individual practice. You will have the opportunity to define what test automation looks like at Stord and hire and grow the people who build it.

Requirements

E2E test framework design: Built and owned a Playwright (or equivalent) framework from scratch.
CI/CD test gating: Wired automated tests into CI (GitHub Actions or equivalent) to block bad releases.
AI-assisted test generation: Built or led adoption of tooling that generates test coverage from specs, acceptance criteria, or user stories, understanding automation limitations.
Contract and API testing: Designed test tooling that validates service contracts.
Event-driven/async testing: Understands challenges of testing asynchronous, event-driven systems (Kafka or equivalent), timing, eventual consistency, and building non-flaky tests.
Coverage tooling and visibility: Integrated coverage tools (Coveralls or equivalent) into a team's workflow to change behavior.
CLI-native workflow: Comfortable driving day-to-day work from the command line and agentic coding tools.
Hiring and technical bar-setting: Hired for a technical function and can hold a high, specific bar.

Nice To Haves

Experience standing up a test engineering or QE function from zero, including hiring, at a company past its early scaling stage.
Load and performance testing framework design.
Direct experience partnering with SRE/infra teams on environment strategy and parity concerns.
Contributions to open-source testing frameworks or tooling.
A track record of growing SDETs or QE engineers into senior or technical leadership roles.

Responsibilities

Hire the SDET team, defining and holding the technical bar.
Set framework standards, tooling decisions, and technical direction.
Establish what "tested" means at Stord before a feature reaches UAT and hold the team accountable.
Own the AI-assisted test generation mandate, converting acceptance criteria and user stories directly into test scripts.
Set patterns and guardrails for AI-generated tests, determining where human review is needed.
Model and enforce AI-fluent ways of working across the team.
Build and own the automation strategy across UI, API, and Kafka eventing surfaces.
Prioritize API-level integration testing first, followed by UI and Kafka eventing coverage.
Set resilience as a non-negotiable design requirement, including retry/backoff patterns, deterministic test data, and explicit handling of eventual consistency for async flows.
Build regression test registers and own contract/API test tooling across services.
Wire coverage dashboards to make coverage gaps visible.
Define load and performance test frameworks for engineering teams.
Partner with SRE on the dedicated Test environment, ensuring schema and config parity with production.
Co-design the move to ephemeral per-PR environments for isolated load testing and PR-level E2E validation.