Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for Development Quality Engineer

🎯 Role Definition

The Development Quality Engineer (DQE) is an engineering-focused quality leader responsible for embedding quality into the software development lifecycle through test automation, CI/CD integration, shift-left practices, performance and security validation, and close collaboration with product and engineering teams. A Development Quality Engineer drives continuous testing, defines test strategy, engineers robust automated test suites, and ensures production readiness for cloud-native, microservices, and API-first systems.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

QA Engineer / Software Tester with strong automation experience
Software Development Engineer in Test (SDET)
Software Engineer with interest in testing and quality

Advancement To:

Senior Development Quality Engineer / Senior SDET
Lead Quality Engineer / QA Lead
Engineering Manager – Quality / Director of Quality Engineering

Lateral Moves:

DevOps / Platform Engineer
Site Reliability Engineer (SRE)
Product Quality or Release Management roles

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

Design, implement and maintain robust automated test frameworks and test suites for unit, integration, API, end-to-end, and regression testing covering both UI and backend services to ensure consistent deliverables across teams.
Define and implement a pragmatic test strategy and quality roadmap aligned with product goals, including test coverage goals, release criteria, and quality gates enforced in CI/CD pipelines.
Collaborate with software engineers and product owners to shift-left testing by introducing unit and component testing standards, TDD/BDD practices, and early defect prevention tactics into sprint workflows.
Integrate automated tests into CI/CD systems (Jenkins, GitLab CI, GitHub Actions, TeamCity) to enable continuous testing, fast feedback loops, and automated release gating for staging and production deployments.
Author, review and execute detailed test plans, test cases, and acceptance criteria for features, bug fixes, and architectural changes, converting requirements into measurable quality outcomes.
Design and run performance, load and stress tests (JMeter, Gatling, Locust) and analyze results to identify bottlenecks, guide capacity planning and validate scaling characteristics of services.
Lead API testing and contract testing efforts using tools and frameworks like Postman, REST-assured, Pact, and OpenAPI-driven testing to ensure stable integrations across microservices and third-party dependencies.
Implement service virtualization, mocking and test harnesses to enable reliable and isolated testing of distributed systems and asynchronous/event-driven architectures.
Build and maintain test data strategies, data pipelines and secure test environments, including automation to provision environments using containers (Docker), Kubernetes, and Infrastructure as Code (Terraform, CloudFormation).
Monitor, triage and manage the defect lifecycle using issue tracking tools (Jira, Azure Boards), driving timely root-cause analysis and cross-functional remediation to reduce escaped defects.
Collaborate with security engineers to perform automated SAST/DAST scans, integrate security testing into pipelines (SonarQube, OWASP ZAP, Snyk) and validate remediation of critical vulnerabilities.
Measure and report quality metrics and KPIs — test coverage, flakiness rate, time to detect/fix defects, release readiness score — using dashboards (Grafana, Kibana) and use them to influence product decisions and engineering investments.
Participate actively in code reviews focused on testability and quality standards, and author testable code and utilities to reduce duplication and increase reuse across projects.
Drive continuous improvement initiatives to reduce test runtime, eliminate flaky tests, increase automation coverage and accelerate release cadence while maintaining high quality.
Architect and maintain end-to-end observability for test and production systems using logging, tracing and metrics (ELK, Prometheus, Jaeger) to validate behavior during tests and post-deployment.
Mentor engineers and QA peers on writing high-quality automated tests, designing reliable test harnesses, and adopting best practices for maintainable test code and frameworks.
Create and maintain release readiness checklists and gating criteria for production deployments, ensuring compliance with regulatory, performance and reliability requirements.
Support reliability and incident response efforts by reproducing production issues in a controlled environment, writing regression tests for root causes and contributing to post-incident reviews.
Partner with product management to define non-functional requirements (NFRs) such as SLA, latency, throughput, and error budgets and to ensure these are validated in CI and pre-production testing.
Evaluate and select testing tools and frameworks based on product architecture and team skill sets, and lead pilot projects to introduce modern test automation and continuous testing capabilities.
Maintain accessibility, cross-browser and cross-platform testing strategies for web and mobile interfaces ensuring consistent user experience across supported clients and platforms.
Ensure compliance with internal and external audit requirements by documenting test evidence, retention policies, and executing repeatable validation procedures for controlled releases.

Secondary Functions

Support ad-hoc data requests and exploratory data analysis.
Contribute to the organization's data strategy and roadmap.
Collaborate with business units to translate data needs into engineering requirements.
Participate in sprint planning and agile ceremonies within the data engineering team.
Assist QA leads and engineering managers with release planning and risk assessments when required.
Provide onboarding and training sessions for new hires on quality tools, processes and the test environment landscape.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

Test automation frameworks and tools: Selenium, Cypress, Playwright, TestNG, JUnit, pytest, Mocha/Chai.
Programming languages: Java, Python, JavaScript/TypeScript, or C# for writing automated tests and test utilities.
API and integration testing: Postman, REST-assured, Pact, OpenAPI-driven testing and contract validation.
CI/CD integration: Jenkins, GitLab CI, GitHub Actions, TeamCity and automation to enforce quality gates in pipelines.
Performance/load testing: JMeter, Gatling, Locust; ability to design realistic load tests and analyze performance metrics.
Cloud and container platforms: AWS, Azure or GCP; Docker and Kubernetes for test environment provisioning and orchestration.
Infrastructure as Code and environment automation: Terraform, CloudFormation, Helm charts and scripting for reproducible test environments.
Observability and monitoring for test validation: ELK stack, Prometheus, Grafana, Jaeger for logs, metrics and tracing.
Security testing basics: SAST/DAST integrations, vulnerability scanning tools such as SonarQube, OWASP ZAP, Snyk or Burp Suite.
Database and data validation: SQL for relational databases, familiarity with NoSQL (MongoDB, Cassandra) and test data management strategies.
Version control and branching strategies: Git, familiarity with trunk-based or GitFlow workflows and change gating.
Test design methodologies: TDD, BDD (Cucumber), exploratory testing, risk-based testing and test planning best practices.
Service virtualization and mocking tools to isolate dependencies during testing.
Familiarity with microservices, event-driven architectures, and asynchronous messaging (Kafka, RabbitMQ) testing patterns.
Quality metrics, dashboards and analytics: ability to define KPIs and use tools to present actionable quality insights.

Soft Skills

Strong collaboration and communication skills to influence engineers, product managers and stakeholders on quality priorities.
Analytical and problem-solving mindset with attention to detail for diagnosing complex system failures and flaky tests.
Coaching and mentoring ability to elevate team testing competencies and drive adoption of best practices.
Customer-focused mindset with the ability to translate product quality expectations into testable acceptance criteria.
Time management and prioritization skills to balance automation, exploratory testing and release support under tight deadlines.
Adaptability to changing requirements, new technologies and evolving CI/CD pipelines in agile environments.
Proactive ownership and a bias for action when identifying and resolving quality risks.
Clear documentation skills to maintain test plans, runbooks, and reproducible test artifacts for audits and onboarding.
Stakeholder management and negotiation to define realistic quality trade-offs and release criteria.
Continuous learning orientation to keep up to date with testing tools, performance practices and cloud-native quality approaches.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Information Systems, Electrical Engineering, Mathematics, or a related technical field; or equivalent practical experience.

Preferred Education:

Master’s degree in Computer Science or related field or relevant industry certifications (ISTQB, Certified SDET, AWS/Azure/GCP certifications).

Relevant Fields of Study:

Computer Science
Software Engineering
Information Systems
Electrical/Electronic Engineering
Mathematics or Applied Statistics
Data Science / Analytics

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range: 3 – 8 years of combined software development and quality engineering experience, with at least 2+ years focused on automation and CI/CD integration.

Preferred: 5+ years as a Development Quality Engineer / SDET / Automation Engineer with demonstrable experience designing test frameworks, integrating tests into CI/CD, testing cloud-native microservices, and owning release quality for production services.