Senior Software Development Engineer in Test (SDET)

Svitla Systems Inc. is looking for a Senior Software Development Engineer in Test (SDET) for a full-time position (40 hours per week) in Europe. Our client is a leading provider of video analysis solutions for loss prevention and security.

You will join the client's Device Management team. This is an engineering role first: you will design and build test automation frameworks, tooling, and infrastructure that let the whole team ship confidently at speed, writing production-quality code against Rust/Node.js APIs, a React front end, and AWS serverless infrastructure. You will work as a peer to developers, with significant latitude to shape how the team approaches testing, from framework design and CI/CD integration to simulating thousands of IoT devices and video streams in a repeatable, automated way.

• 5+ years of experience in software testing with strong hands-on coding ability (this is a build-things role, not primarily a manual-execution role).
• Strong programming skills in Python, plus working proficiency in TypeScript/JavaScript and/or Rust, sufficient to build and maintain real test infrastructure and tooling.
• Demonstrated experience designing and building test automation frameworks from the ground up (API, UI, or integration layers), not just using existing ones.
• Comfort working in Linux environments.
• Solid understanding of AWS services (Lambda, DynamoDB, SQS, Kinesis, or similar) and how they underpin distributed, serverless SaaS applications.
• Experience integrating automated tests into CI/CD pipelines and treating test infrastructure as a first-class engineering deliverable.
• Ability to read and reason about production code, participate meaningfully in code reviews, and collaborate with developers as a technical peer.
• Systems thinking, including the ability to reason about distributed, event-driven, and resilience-focused architectures.
• Excellent communication skills, with the confidence to give direct, technically substantiated feedback to developers and stakeholders.
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or a related field, or equivalent practical or engineering experience.
• Experience with Infrastructure as Code tools (CDK, Terraform, Serverless Framework) for provisioning test environments.
• Experience with IoT device communication protocols and building device simulators for test purposes.
• Experience with video development, video streaming technologies, or testing video pipelines.
• Familiarity with production monitoring and observability tooling (e.g., Datadog, Grafana, CloudWatch).
• Experience with Snowflake, Elasticsearch, or other cloud-native data platforms.
• Contributions to open-source testing and automation tools, or strong personal projects demonstrating framework design skills.
• Prior experience in a fast-growing SaaS environment.
• Interest in eventually contributing to product code, or a background that blends SDET and full-stack development work.

Automation framework and tooling development

• Design, build, and maintain automated test frameworks and libraries spanning REST APIs, UI (React), security, and end-to-end and integration layers.
• Write production-quality code for test harnesses, device simulators, performance tools, and mocks that emulate IoT device behavior and video streams at scale.
• Build and maintain tooling that improves testability across the stack, including for distributed, event-driven components (Lambda, DynamoDB, SQS, Kinesis).
• Integrate automated test suites into CI/CD pipelines, optimizing for fast, reliable feedback on every build and deployment.
• Evaluate and introduce new tools, frameworks, and approaches to keep test infrastructure scalable as the platform and team grow.

Engineering collaboration and architecture

• Participate as a technical peer in design sessions, RFCs, and architecture discussions, advocating for testability, observability, and reliability from the start.
• Review code and pull requests with an eye toward correctness, edge cases, performance, and long-term maintainability.
• Work closely with backend and frontend engineers to understand system design and build automation that reflects real production behavior.
• Contribute to system reliability by supporting monitoring, alerting, and troubleshooting efforts, including issues involving device connectivity.

Test strategy and coverage

• Design test plans and strategies for new and existing features, deciding where automation adds the most value versus targeted manual and exploratory testing.
• Drive test coverage for IoT device configuration, monitoring, deployment, and connectivity workflows, as well as video playback, recording, and streaming features.
• Validate distributed cloud systems for correctness, performance, and resilience under realistic and edge-case load.
• Own test estimation and planning as part of sprint and release cycles, working directly with engineering leads.

Quality leadership

• Act as a proactive voice for quality across the engineering organization, identifying systemic risks early and proposing engineering solutions (not just flagging bugs).
• Mentor other engineers and QA team members on automation practices, framework usage, and testable design.
• Provide direct, technically grounded feedback to developers and stakeholders when quality or architecture decisions are at risk.