6+ years in QE, majority in test automation (not manual).
Ownership of test automation frameworks you built/re-architected — not just tests against someone else's framework (core requirement).
Strong coding in Python, Java, TypeScript, or equivalent: base classes, utilities, config, reporting, test data management.
API automation (REST Assured, Karate, pytest, Postman/Newman, Playwright API): auth handling, schema validation, contract testing.
UI automation (Playwright, Cypress, Selenium): POM architecture, dynamic elements, parallel execution.
Flaky-test diagnosis and elimination: proper waits, isolation, deterministic setup/teardown, root-cause fixes over blanket retries.
Performance/load testing (JMeter, k6, Locust, Gatling): scenario design, bottleneck ID, throughput/latency validation.
Strong SQL for data validation: joins, aggregations, window functions, source-vs-target reconciliation at scale.
ETL/streaming pipeline testing: schema validation, row/value-level comparison, completeness/duplication checks, sampling strategies.
Event-driven/message queue testing (Kafka): payload validation, ordering, delivery semantics, idempotency, consumer lag/offsets.
Stateful stream processing testing (Flink): checkpoint/savepoint recovery, state restoration, late/out-of-order events, backpressure behavior.
End-to-end latency validation against SLOs (p95/p99), distinguishing in-scope processing from excluded external calls.
CI/CD test integration: trigger config, stages, artifact/report publishing, failure gates.
Test data management: setup/cleanup, inter-test dependencies, synthetic/masked datasets.
Structured, auditable test evidence tied to exact artifact version/config.
Data governance/privacy testing: consent enforcement, classification, tokenization/masking, verifying no raw identifiers leak downstream.
Identity resolution/entity matching testing: matching outcomes, merge/split, lifecycle transitions.
Multi-tenant testing: isolation, RBAC/ABAC, cross-tenant leakage checks.
Replay/backfill/reconciliation validation without re-triggering side effects.
Lakehouse data validation (Paimon, Iceberg, Delta via Trino/Spark): stream-vs-table completeness/correctness.
Failure-injection/resilience testing: node/broker/cache loss, recovery integrity, no dupes/loss.
Kubernetes-deployed platform testing: namespaced envs, Helm, pod/job lifecycle, log/metric access.
Observability tooling familiarity (Grafana, Prometheus, OpenSearch, tracing).
AI/ML/LLM output validation a plus: non-deterministic testing, regression measurement, fabrication detection.
Rigorous defect discipline: reproducible reports, severity/triage judgment, maintained regression suite.
Domain plus: CDP/customer 360, telecom/high-volume transactional systems, real-time SLA systems, AdTech/MarTech, analytics/dashboards.
AI tooling familiarity (Claude, Cursor, Codex)