SDET Manager II

About HighLevel: HighLevel is an AI-powered business operating system that gives agencies, entrepreneurs and SMBs the infrastructure to build, automate and scale. Today, HighLevel supports SMBs across 150+ countries, fueling community-driven growth rooted in real customer outcomes. To date, businesses operating on HighLevel have generated over $7 billion in ecosystem value, demonstrating the impact of shared infrastructure at scale. By centralizing conversations, automation and intelligence into one system, we help businesses move faster, reduce complexity and execute efficiently. Behind the platform, HighLevel powers more than 4 billion API hits and 2.5 billion message events daily. With 250 terabytes of distributed data, 250+ microservices and over 1 million domain names supported, our architecture is built for performance, resilience and long-term scalability. Our People With over 2,000 team members across 10+ countries, HighLevel operates as a global, remote-first organization built for speed and ownership. We value initiative, clarity and execution, creating space for ambitious people to build systems that support millions of businesses worldwide. Here, innovation thrives, ideas are celebrated and people come first, no matter where they call home. Our Impact Every month, HighLevel enables more than 1.5 billion messages, 200 million leads and 20 million conversations for the more than 1 million businesses we support. Behind those numbers are real people building independence, expanding opportunity and creating measurable impact. We’re proud to be a part of that. Learn more about us on our YouTube Channel or Blog Posts. About the Role:: We’re looking for an experienced SDET Manager to lead and scale our Quality Engineering team at HighLevel. This is a key leadership role responsible for driving our test automation strategy, quality processes, and engineering excellence across our products. You will lead a high-performing team of SDETs and play a crucial role in building a culture of quality-first, shift-left testing, and continuous improvement. You will be responsible for strengthening our automation frameworks, improving productivity through GenAI tools, and partnering closely with development and release teams to deliver world-class software with speed and reliability. Responsibilities:: Own quality engineering outcomes across multiple teams/domains, driving consistent standards for release quality, reliability, automation, and engineering excellence. Lead, mentor, and develop Lead/Senior SDETs and QA engineers, building strong technical leadership and enabling effective execution across teams. Standardize automation practices, frameworks, code quality standards, and quality benchmarks across squads to establish consistent engineering practices. Champion Shift-Left Testing by embedding quality practices throughout the development lifecycle and integrating automated validation and quality gates into CI/CD pipelines. Partner with Engineering Managers, Technical Leads, Product, and Architecture teams to align quality strategy with engineering architecture, platform direction, and product priorities. Provide architectural and technical guidance on test strategy, automation frameworks, tooling, infrastructure, testability, and quality engineering practices. Build and evolve scalable automation frameworks using TypeScript/Playwright and other relevant technologies, enabling teams to develop reliable and maintainable test suites. Own release quality and readiness across teams by establishing measurable quality gates and driving improvements in release reliability, production defect leakage, regression effectiveness, and overall quality. Drive performance and reliability engineering practices, including performance benchmarks, critical API/service coverage, monitoring expectations, and early identification of scalability and reliability risks. Drive adoption of GenAI/AI-assisted quality engineering practices, including intelligent test generation, requirement-to-test traceability, failure analysis, and improvements in engineering productivity. Use quality metrics and engineering data to identify systemic gaps, prioritize improvement initiatives, and demonstrate measurable improvements in defect reduction, automation effectiveness, and release confidence. Drive cross-team quality initiatives from strategy through execution, influencing stakeholders and ensuring accountability for agreed quality outcomes. Foster a culture of continuous improvement, technical excellence, innovation, and shared quality ownership across Engineering. Requirements:: 9–12 years of overall experience in Quality Engineering. Proven experience managing and mentoring a large SDET team. Strong hands-on background as a Test Automation Architect, ideally in TypeScript and Playwright. Excellent understanding of test automation design patterns, CI/CD pipelines, cloud environments (AWS/GCP), and development workflows. Hands-on expertise with API testing, Performance testing (e.g., JMeter, k6, Gatling), and Mobile Test Automation (Appium or equivalent). Strong believer in Shift-Left Testing, enabling early quality validation in SDLC. Demonstrated ability to set up scalable automation frameworks and increase automation coverage. Experience building testing infrastructure and pipelines for microservices or cloud-native applications. Exposure to streaming, content creation, or community platforms is highly desirable. Track record of scaling teams and processes in fast-paced product organizations. Passion for mentoring engineers, fostering technical growth, and promoting a culture of continuous learning. Enthusiasm for leveraging GenAI and AI agents to enhance testing productivity, efficiency, and intelligence.