Senior QA Engineer (Automation + Data + Kafka)

This role is for one of the Weekday's clients Salary range: Rs 1600000 - Rs 2800000 (ie INR 16-28 LPA) Experience: 5+ yrs Location: India Job Type: Remote (India) We are looking for a highly skilled QA Engineer with strong expertise in test automation, API validation, Kafka event-driven architectures, and data quality assurance. In this role, you will own the end-to-end quality strategy for complex distributed systems and data integration platforms, ensuring reliability across APIs, event pipelines, databases, and downstream data warehouses. You will work closely with engineering, product, and business teams to validate data accuracy, system performance, and platform stability throughout the software development lifecycle. The ideal candidate brings a strong blend of manual and automated testing capabilities, deep understanding of ETL testing and data validation, and hands-on experience testing microservices and event-driven applications. This position offers an opportunity to play a critical role in building high-quality, scalable platforms by driving robust testing frameworks, improving release confidence, and ensuring seamless data flow across interconnected systems. Key Responsibilities Design and implement comprehensive test strategies covering unit, integration, contract, system, and end-to-end testing. Validate API functionality, performance, and reliability using automation frameworks and testing tools. Test Kafka-based event pipelines, including producers, consumers, message flows, and event processing logic. Perform end-to-end data validation across APIs, Kafka streams, databases, and data warehouses. Build, maintain, and optimize automated test suites using frameworks such as PyTest, Selenium, Jest, or equivalent tools. Conduct ETL testing and data reconciliation to ensure consistency and accuracy across distributed systems. Validate AVRO schemas and manage contract testing for schema compatibility and versioning. Execute integration testing across microservices and distributed applications. Support User Acceptance Testing (UAT), defect management, release validation, and production readiness activities. Collaborate with development teams to identify, troubleshoot, and resolve quality issues. Participate in CI/CD processes and ensure automated quality gates within deployment pipelines. Monitor test coverage, quality metrics, and release risks while driving continuous improvement initiatives. What Makes You a Great Fit 5+ years of experience in QA Engineering, SDET, Test Automation, or related quality assurance roles. Strong expertise in API automation testing and automation frameworks such as PyTest, Selenium, Jest, or similar. Hands-on experience working with Kafka and event-driven architectures. Deep understanding of ETL testing, data validation, and distributed data pipelines. Experience validating data across multiple layers including APIs, messaging systems, databases, and data warehouses. Strong knowledge of integration testing, microservices testing, and system-level validation. Experience working with CI/CD tools such as Jenkins, GitLab CI, or GitHub Actions. Familiarity with AVRO schemas, Schema Registry, and contract testing methodologies is highly desirable. Knowledge of cloud-based data platforms such as Snowflake, BigQuery, or Redshift is an advantage. Experience with performance testing, soak testing, idempotency validation, and data consistency testing is a plus. Strong analytical, debugging, and problem-solving capabilities. Excellent collaboration and communication skills with the ability to work effectively across engineering and business teams.