Technical Engineering Manager, SDET

Alkami Technology•Bentonville, AR

20h•Remote

About The Position

Alkami is a leading cloud-based digital banking solutions provider for financial institutions in the United States that helps clients to transform through retail and business banking, digital account opening and loan origination, payment fraud prevention, and data analytics and engagement solutions. Alkami’s Mobile App Platform has been certified by J.D. Power for providing clients with “An Outstanding Mobile Banking Platform Experience.” Founded in 2009, we continue to be recognized for our intentional culture and tremendous growth (Best Place to Work in Fintech; Best & Brightest to Work For Nationally; and Comparably’s Best Company Culture, Best Career Growth, Best Engineering Team, and Best Places to Work in Dallas, among others). Through our bold investments in technology and people, we empower our clients to grow confidently, adapt quickly, and build thriving digital banking communities through tailored experiences for over 19.5M users. As a remote-first company, most of our positions can be remote in the US, except for key roles, which will be indicated in the Job Title. Follow us on Glassdoor and Linkedin! As a Technical Engineering Manager, SDET at Alkami, you will lead and support a team of Software Development Engineers in Test (SDETs) responsible for delivering scalable, high-quality automation frameworks and testing solutions. This role combines people leadership with deep technical execution. You will be expected to stay close to the codebase, contributing directly to the design and development of automation frameworks, tools, and infrastructure—allocating approximately between 20%-30% of your time to hands-on coding. You will play a pivotal role in embedding quality early in the development lifecycle, partnering closely with cross-functional engineering teams to drive continuous validation, shift-left strategies, and test reliability at scale. As a technical leader, you will foster engineering excellence, support career growth, and enable high-velocity, quality-driven software delivery.

Requirements

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent practical experience.
8+ years of experience in quality engineering or software development, including:
2–4 years in a technical leadership or management role overseeing SDET or QA engineers.
Proficiency in one or more programming languages such as Java, JavaScript/TypeScript, or Python.
Deep experience with UI and API automation tools: Playwright, Selenium, Appium, JUnit/TestNG, RestAssured, Postman.
Demonstrated ability to design and scale automation frameworks in complex, distributed environments.
Familiarity with CI/CD tooling and infrastructure (e.g., Jenkins, GitHub Actions).
Solid understanding of software testing principles (unit, integration, system, performance) and the testing pyramid.
Effective communication, collaboration, and influence across engineering, product, and operations teams.

Nice To Haves

Experience in cloud-native architectures and services (e.g., AWS Lambda, EKS, CloudFront).
Exposure to observability tooling and production validation strategies (e.g., Datadog, Grafana).
Experience testing distributed systems in regulated environments (e.g., FinTech), with emphasis on automated compliance validation, audit traceability, and secure test data management.
Familiarity with modern quality engineering paradigms, including contract testing for microservices, chaos engineering to assess system resilience under failure conditions, and canary deployments for safe, progressive releases in production.

Responsibilities

Lead, coach, and grow a team of SDETs focused on full-stack automation (Web, Mobile, API).
Architect and contribute to test automation frameworks, tools, and libraries to improve velocity, maintainability, and coverage.
Actively participate in design and code reviews, and own the quality of automation deliverables for critical systems.
Write clean, maintainable, and scalable code (~20%-30% hands-on contribution expected) in alignment with best practices for automation and validation.
Drive adoption of engineering best practices: shift-left testing, quality gates, mocking, service virtualization, and risk-based testing.
Partner with development, product, DevOps, and security to define and execute on test strategies for integration, regression, exploratory, and performance testing.
Enable continuous validation by integrating tests into CI/CD pipelines using tools such as Jenkins or GitHub Actions.
Monitor key quality metrics (e.g., defect escape rate, test coverage, automation reliability) and drive data-informed decisions.
Ensure test environments, data provisioning, and automation infrastructure meet the needs of fast-moving teams.
Participate in hiring, onboarding, mentoring, and professional development of engineering talent.
Champion a culture of ownership, accountability, and engineering excellence.