IND Lead Software Engineer - GCC026 We’re determined to make a difference and are proud to be an insurance company that goes well beyond coverages and policies. Working here means having every opportunity to achieve your goals – and to help others accomplish theirs, too. Join our team as we help shape the future. Position OverviewWe are seeking a highly skilled Senior Staff SDET to join our Premium Audit transformation team in Hyderabad, India. In this role, you will architect, implement, and scale automated testing for the Premium Audit platform spanning UI, API, data, and workflow layers. You’ll enable high‑velocity delivery by building robust automation frameworks (Playwright, REST Assured), integrating quality gates into CI/CD pipelines, and collaborating with Engineering, Product, and Ops to ensure releases are secure, reliable, and performant. You’ll also mentor SDETs across the GCC pod model and champion modern test strategies (shift‑left, contract testing, observability‑driven validation) that align to our Premium Audit transformation.Key Responsibilities - Define end‑to‑end test strategy (UI, API, data, performance, security) and own the test automation architecture for Premium Audit services and front‑ends. - Build and maintain Playwright UI suites and REST Assured API frameworks; standardize patterns, utilities, fixtures, and test data management for reuse across teams. - Drive contract tests for REST services, mock/virtualize dependencies where needed, and verify integration flows across event‑driven services and rules/triage engines. - Embed smoke, regression, and non‑functional checks into automated CI/CD pipelines (gating, parallelization, flaky‑test management, artifacting) to ensure predictable, fast feedback. - Use SQL to validate audit data transformations, reconcile service responses to source of truth, and codify data‑quality assertions in automation suites. - Incorporate Premium Audit domain rules (documents, exposures, triage paths) into test scenarios to maximize defect prevention and business accuracy. - Partner with engineers and BAs to define acceptance criteria, add test hooks/telemetry, and adopt TDD/BDD where valuable. - Collaborate on performance, resilience, and security checks aligned with enterprise standards and platform SLIs/SLOs. - Coach SDETs/engineers across GCC teams; uplift testing craft, code quality, and review practices. - Improve test observability (logs, traces, metrics), triage pipeline failures quickly, and drive continuous improvement of flakiness, coverage, and mean‑time‑to‑detect. Required Skills & Experience - 9-12 years in SDET roles with a strong track record building test automation for cloud‑native, microservices‑based systems. - Expert with Playwright and Karate for UI and REST Assured for API automation; hands‑on with Postman for exploratory/API validation. - Proven experience integrating automated test suites into enterprise CI/CD pipelines, including parallel execution, environment configuration, artifacts, and test‑data seeding. - Strong coding skills (e.g., TypeScript/Java) with clean test‑code design, use of fixtures/mocks, dependency injection, and maintainable framework patterns. - Comfortable writing complex SQL for verification, reconciliation, and data‑quality checks across transactional and analytical stores. - Solid understanding of REST APIs, event‑driven architectures, workflow/rules engines, and integration testing at system boundaries. - Experience contributing to backlog refinement, definition of done, and iterative delivery within Agile/SAFe teams. - Ability to map test scenarios to Premium Audit processes and financial/insurance operational controls. - Familiarity with AWS‑based delivery, containerized runners, and pipeline tooling such as Jenkins or Azure DevOps. Nice to Have Skills - Experience with performance testing (e.g., k6, Gatling, JMeter), chaos/resilience checks, and tuning within CI. - Experience with service virtualization, synthetic data generation, and privacy‑aware test data management. - Awareness of OWASP‑aligned security testing practices and collaboration with AppSec to automate baseline security validations. - Working knowledge of P&C / Premium Audit workflows (documents, exposure/classification logic, audit review paths) What We Offer - Opportunity to work on advanced cloud automation and AI technologies. - Collaborative and innovative work environment. - Competitive compensation and comprehensive benefits. - Continuous learning and professional development opportunities. [About Us](https://www.thehartford.com/about-us) | [Our Culture](https://www.thehartford.com/about-us/corporate-culture) | [What It’s Like to Work Here](https://www.thehartford.com/careers/our-employees)