Staff Software Development Engineer in Test (SDET)

Faeth Therapeutics is a clinical-stage oncology company listed on Nasdaq that recently raised $200M in funding. With a strong scientific foundation and a founding team that includes the discoverer of our target pathway, we are advancing PIKTOR, a multi-node PI3K/AKT/mTOR inhibitor program, toward multiple near-term milestones. We are a small, focused team where every person has direct impact — united by a shared commitment to care deeply, create boldly, and never stop learning.

We’re looking for a Staff SDET to help shape the test strategy and quality infrastructure across our core platform. The platform is in production and growing. Test infrastructure exists but needs a strategic overhaul - someone who can assess what’s there, identify gaps, and rebuild it to scale with the product and the team.

This isn’t a role where you write test cases someone else designed. You’ll define the testing philosophy, build the automation frameworks, and embed quality into the engineering culture. You’ll work across the full stack and need to be as comfortable reading production code as writing test code.

What makes this role distinctive: we’re building agentic systems - AI-driven workflows and orchestration pipelines - and testing them is a genuinely hard, unsolved problem. We need someone already thinking about how to validate non-deterministic, multi-step agent behaviour.

We expect heavy usage of agentic coding tools in your own workflow. You should be using tools like Claude Code not just to write tests faster, but to rethink what’s possible in test generation, coverage analysis, and defect detection.

This is an early-stage company. You’ll wear many hats - from architecting test frameworks to triaging production incidents to setting up monitoring for a new service. If you thrive when the scope is wide and the impact is direct, keep reading.

 

Reports to: Senior Engineering Manager

Location: Remote (India)

 

Responsibilities:

• Own and overhaul the test strategy. Assess existing infrastructure, design a testing architecture covering unit, integration, contract, e2e, and performance layers.
• Build automation frameworks that scale. Create robust, maintainable test automation that keeps pace with a fast-moving product team. CI/CD integration is table stakes - you’ll own the entire quality pipeline.
• Test agentic systems. Design testing strategies for AI-driven workflows and orchestration pipelines. Tackle the hard problems: non-deterministic outputs, multi-step agent behavior, tool-use validation, fallback paths, and observability of agent decision-making. Build harnesses that can evaluate agent reliability at scale.
• Make security and performance testable. Build automated security scanning into the pipeline. Design performance test suites that catch regressions before they reach production. Establish baselines, thresholds, and alerting for latency, throughput, and resource consumption.
• Shift quality left. Work alongside developers to embed testing into the development workflow so quality is everyone’s responsibility.
• Leverage agentic coding extensively. Use tools like Claude Code as a core part of your workflow - for generating test scaffolds, analyzing coverage gaps, exploring edge cases, and accelerating repetitive testing tasks. Influence the team to adopt these tools where they demonstrably improve velocity and quality.
• Mentor and uplevel. Help engineers write better tests. Review test design, not just test code. Raise the bar on what the team considers “adequately tested.”
• Stay sharp. Keep a pulse on emerging trends in test engineering, AI-assisted QA, chaos engineering, and observability. Bring what’s relevant back to the team.
• Wear whatever hat is needed. Jump into production debugging, incident response, developer tooling, or anything else the team needs.

Requirements:

• 8+ years in software engineering or test engineering with a significant portion in SDET or quality infrastructure roles. You’ve owned a test strategy, not just executed it.
• E2E testing at scale. Playwright or equivalent - multi-browser config, auth flow automation, Page Object Model, trace collection, and CI-tuned retry strategies.
• CI/CD pipeline design. GitHub Actions or equivalent - right tests at the right time, parallelized suites, cached dependencies, fast-fail before expensive e2e runs.
• Experience testing agentic systems. You’ve worked with AI-driven workflows, orchestration pipelines, or agent-based systems and have practical approaches for validating non-deterministic, multi-step behavior. You understand the difference between testing traditional software and testing systems that make decisions.
• Heavy agentic coding user. You’re already using tools like Claude Code, Copilot, or similar extensively in your daily work - not as a novelty, but as a core part of how you build and test. You have strong opinions on where these tools excel and where they fall short.
• Test framework architecture experience. You’ve designed and built test automation frameworks from scratch or significantly overhauled existing ones. You know the trade-offs between different testing patterns and can make pragmatic choices.
• Security and performance testing chops. You can build automated security scans into CI, design load test scenarios, and set up performance baselines and regression detection.
• Strong shipping discipline. You balance comprehensive coverage with pragmatic delivery. You know when a test suite is protecting the team and when it’s just slowing them down.
• Bias for ownership and action. You default to action. When something is broken or unclear, you step in and fix it without being asked and take responsibility for the outcome.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience in healthcare, biotech, or life sciences - particularly with data platforms supporting clinical or research workflows.
• Experience with early-stage or growth-stage companies - building quality infrastructure under constraints, limited resources, shifting priorities, and fast release cycles.
• Hands-on experience with chaos engineering, fault injection, or resilience testing.
• Familiarity with contract testing tools (Pact, etc.) for microservice or API-heavy architectures.
• Background in observability and monitoring (Datadog, Grafana, OpenTelemetry) tied to quality metrics.
• Experience with infrastructure-as-code testing (Terraform, CDK) and CI/CD pipeline reliability.
• Track record of evaluating and introducing new testing tools or frameworks based on measured outcomes.
• Contributions to open source testing tools or public writing on test engineering.