Lead Software Engineer in Test - Agentic AI

Job Summary:


The Lead Software Engineer in Test – Agentic AI is a hands-on technical leader on Nextech’s horizontal Software Engineer in Test (SET) team, which serves as a platform layer supporting engineering teams across product development. This role advances the company’s Agentic Development Lifecycle (ADLC) by building AI-driven testing agents, shared test infrastructure, and test tooling, and by putting the governance and guardrails in place so agentic testing can scale. 

Essential Functions

• In addition to adhering to Nextech’s conduct and behavioral standards, responsibilities include:

  • Design, develop, and maintain scalable automation frameworks and regression test suites across UI, API, backend, and AI-driven applications.

  • Lead quality engineering initiatives for Agentic AI systems, including LLM workflows, RAG pipelines, autonomous agents, and distributed orchestration platforms.

  • Validate complex AI agent behaviors such as multi-agent coordination, tool calling, prompt chaining, memory retention, conversational workflows, and fallback/retry mechanisms.

  • Develop and execute functional, integration, regression, end-to-end, and performance testing strategies across cloud-native and distributed environments.

  • Collaborate with Software Engineers, Product Managers, and DevOps teams to integrate testing throughout the software development lifecycle.

  • Build reusable automation solutions to validate APIs, orchestration layers, asynchronous workflows, enterprise integrations, and AI-driven business processes.

  • Design and maintain robust test environments, CI/CD integrations, cloud execution platforms, and automation pipelines to improve efficiency and reliability.

  • Establish and drive best practices related to code quality, maintainability, scalability, dependency injection, observability, and testability.

  • Lead validation efforts for AI workflow resiliency, distributed system reliability, data consistency, and orchestration performance under failure and edge-case conditions.

  • Mentor QA engineers and contribute to the development of scalable QA standards, automation strategies, reporting practices, and continuous improvement initiatives.

Minimum Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, MIS, Engineering, or a related technical field.

• 8+ years of experience in Software Development or Software Engineer in Test (SDET/SET) roles.5+ years of hands-on experience developing automation frameworks using JavaScript/TypeScript or Java.

• Strong experience with automation tools such as Playwright, Cypress, Postman, K6, or equivalent frameworks.2+ years of experience testing AI-powered applications, LLM systems, Agentic AI platforms, orchestration frameworks, or autonomous workflows.

• Hands-on experience validating agent orchestration workflows, conversational AI applications, multi-step reasoning systems, and AI-driven business processes.

• Experience testing AI orchestration frameworks such as LangGraph, CrewAI, AutoGen, Semantic Kernel, or similar technologies.

• Strong expertise in API testing, backend integration testing, UI automation, and end-to-end workflow validation.

• Solid understanding of automation architecture, design patterns, anti-patterns, dependency injection, and inversion of control principles.

• Experience working in cloud-native and containerized environments (Azure, AWS, GCP, Docker, Kubernetes).Proven experience integrating automated test suites into CI/CD pipelines and distributed cloud environments.

• Experience validating asynchronous, event-driven, and distributed systems with a focus on resiliency and fault tolerance.

• Strong analytical, debugging, troubleshooting, and problem-solving skills.

• Excellent organizational, communication, and stakeholder collaboration skills in Agile environments.

• Experience with AI observability, telemetry, RAG pipeline validation, vector databases, or prompt evaluation frameworks (preferred).

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with Azure DevOps, GitHub Actions, or similar CI/CD platforms.
• Experience with AI observability tools, telemetry platforms, and prompt evaluation frameworks.Experience validating RAG pipelines, vector databases, and AI response accuracy.
• Knowledge of healthcare systems, HIPAA compliance, and regulated enterprise environments.
• Experience with event-driven architectures, messaging systems, and distributed data platforms (including SQL Server).
• Prior experience leading QA teams, mentoring engineers, and implementing enterprise test reporting and quality metrics practices.

Work Environment/Physical Demands

• Remote work
• Activities require a significant amount of work in front of a computer monitor.