Hire Remote SDETs (Software Development Engineers in Test)

Hire SDETs Who Build Test Automation That Actually Scales

Most test automation fails within 18 months — brittle selectors, monolithic test suites, no ownership model, and automation that takes longer to maintain than the manual testing it replaced. SDETs who understand software engineering fundamentals — architecture, design patterns, CI/CD, and test strategy — build automation that teams actually run, trust, and maintain.

We match you with senior SDETs who’ve built test automation infrastructure at scale for high-growth SaaS companies, enterprise software organizations, and consumer platforms. Engineers who write production-quality test code, design automation architectures that survive product changes, and shift quality left into the development process — not just add automated checks at the end.

Start in days, not months. Pay 50% less than equivalent US-based SDET talent.

What Our SDETs Build

Test Automation Framework Architecture

Designing and building automation frameworks from scratch: architecture decisions (Page Object Model, Screenplay pattern, custom DSLs), technology selection (Playwright, Cypress, Selenium, Appium), reporting infrastructure, and the CI/CD integration that makes automation a first-class engineering artifact.

API & Contract Testing

Comprehensive API test suites covering functional correctness, boundary conditions, error handling, and performance baselines. Contract testing with Pact or similar frameworks that prevent breaking changes from reaching integration environments undetected.

CI/CD Pipeline Integration

Integrating test automation into GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Jenkins, and CircleCI pipelines — parallel test execution, flaky test detection, test result trend analysis, and quality gates that block bad code from merging without creating developer frustration.

Performance & Load Testing

JMeter, Gatling, k6, and Locust load testing frameworks built into CI/CD pipelines — automated performance regression detection that catches slowdowns before they reach production.

Mobile Test Automation

Appium, Detox (React Native), XCUITest, and Espresso automation for iOS and Android applications — including device farm integration (BrowserStack, Sauce Labs, AWS Device Farm) for cross-device coverage.

SDET Technology Stack

Test Frameworks: Playwright, Cypress, Selenium WebDriver, Appium, Detox, XCUITest, Espresso

Languages: TypeScript, JavaScript, Python, Java, C# (matched to your stack)

API Testing: Postman/Newman, REST-assured, Pact (contract testing), GraphQL testing

Performance: JMeter, Gatling, k6, Locust, Apache Benchmark

CI/CD: GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Jenkins, CircleCI, TeamCity, Azure DevOps

Reporting: Allure, TestRail, Zephyr, custom dashboards, Grafana/InfluxDB for performance

Client Success Story: E-Commerce Platform — 94% Reduction in Regression Testing Time

A mid-market e-commerce company was spending 3 weeks per quarter on manual regression testing before each release — a bottleneck that limited them to 4 releases per year. Our SDET audited their existing test approach, designed a Playwright-based automation framework with a Page Object Model architecture, and built 380 automated regression tests covering their critical checkout, account, and catalog flows over 12 weeks. Regression testing time dropped from 3 weeks to 4 hours. Release frequency increased from quarterly to biweekly within 6 months. Defect escape rate to production dropped 67%.

Client Success Story: Enterprise SaaS — Test Automation That Survived 3 Major Product Pivots

A Series B SaaS company had burned through two automation efforts — both collapsed when the product changed significantly. Our SDET designed a third attempt with an explicit resilience goal: abstraction layers that isolated product changes to single points of update, a Screenplay pattern architecture with reusable task-level components, and a contract testing layer that caught API breaking changes in under 3 minutes. The framework has survived two major UI redesigns and one complete API versioning transition without a rewrite. Test execution time for 600 tests: 8 minutes in CI.

Why Companies Choose Our SDETs

• Software engineering depth: They write production-quality automation code — not fragile recorded scripts
• Framework architects: They design automation that survives product change — not just automation that works today
• Shift-left philosophy: They integrate quality into development workflow, not just gate releases after the fact
• 50% cost savings: Senior SDET expertise at a fraction of US market rates
• Fast start: Most engagements begin within 1–2 weeks

Engagement Models

• Individual SDET — One senior SDET embedded with your engineering team to build automation infrastructure and shift quality left.
• SDET + QA Engineer Pod — An SDET who builds automation paired with a QA Engineer handling manual exploratory testing. Full QA coverage without a large headcount.
• QA Automation Teams — Multiple SDETs for high-velocity engineering organizations requiring automation at scale across multiple product areas.
• Contract-to-Hire — Evaluate an SDET’s automation architecture approach before committing long-term.

How To Vet SDETs

Our vetting identifies SDETs who are engineers — not just testers who learned a scripting tool.

1. Software engineering assessment — OOP principles, design patterns (Page Object, Factory, Strategy), data structures, and algorithmic thinking. SDETs who can’t engineer maintainable code produce automation that collapses. Over 90% of applicants do not pass this stage.
2. Automation architecture challenge — Given a web application, design a complete test automation framework: technology choices, architecture pattern, CI/CD integration strategy, and maintenance model. Evaluated on engineering judgment, not just framework knowledge.
3. Live coding — Write automation tests for a real web application. Evaluated on selector strategy, abstraction quality, assertions, and error handling — not just whether the test passes.
4. Test strategy interview — Given a new feature with no existing tests, what’s their test strategy? How do they prioritize? What do they automate vs. leave to manual testing?

What to Look for When Hiring SDETs

Strong SDETs approach automation as a software engineering discipline — not a QA task.

What strong candidates demonstrate:

• They design automation frameworks with explicit maintenance strategy — they’ve thought about what happens when the product changes
• They understand test pyramid principles: unit tests, integration tests, and E2E tests serve different purposes and have different cost/benefit ratios
• They’ve built CI/CD pipeline integration themselves — they’ve configured test parallelization, set quality gates, and handled flaky test management
• They can explain why a specific selector strategy (by role, by test ID, by text vs. by CSS) matters for test stability

Red flags to watch for:

• Portfolio consists of recorded tests or CSS selector-heavy Selenium scripts without abstraction layers
• No CI/CD pipeline integration experience — has only run tests locally or in a separate test environment
• Can’t explain why flaky tests are an architecture problem, not just a maintenance task
• Has never written a framework from scratch — has only added tests to an existing framework

Interview questions that reveal real depth:

• “Walk me through an automation framework you designed from scratch. What architectural decisions did you make, and what would you do differently?”
• “How do you handle a situation where 30% of your automated tests are flaky? What’s your diagnosis and remediation approach?”
• “Explain the test pyramid to me and how you’d implement it for a React frontend with a Node.js API backend and a PostgreSQL database.”

Related Services

• QA Engineers — Manual and exploratory QA engineers who complement SDETs with comprehensive test coverage.
• QA Automation Engineers — Automation-focused QA engineers for teams needing automated test coverage without full SDET framework architecture.
• DevOps & SRE Engineers — Infrastructure engineers who build the CI/CD pipelines that SDET automation runs within.
• Full-Stack Developers — Engineering teams that benefit most from embedded SDET support.

Want to Hire Remote SDETs?

We source, vet, and place senior SDETs who build test automation infrastructure that engineering teams actually trust — frameworks that survive product change, integrate into CI/CD pipelines, and eliminate the regression burden that slows releases down. Whether you need one SDET or a complete QA automation team, we make it fast, affordable, and low-risk.

Get matched with SDETs →

Ready to hire SDETs who build automation that lasts? Contact us today and we’ll introduce you to senior SDETs within 48 hours.