- Plan, design, and execute test strategies for software releases, ensuring all functional, regression, and integration test suites are completed within defined timelines and quality benchmarks.

- Actively participate in release cycles, validating builds in staging and preproduction environments, tracking defects, and signing off on release readiness in collaboration with the release management team.

- Work closely with developers and product teams to understand feature requirements, review technical designs, and provide early feedback on testability and potential risk areas.

- Serve as a key point of contact for test-related communications, proactively raising blockers, sharing test progress updates, and escalating critical defects to the appropriate stakeholders without delay.

- Collaborate with cross-functional teams to triage and prioritize defects, ensuring issues are clearly documented, reproduced, and assigned with the necessary context for swift resolution.

- Develop and maintain a robust automated test framework using Java, JUnit/TestNG, and related tools, continuously improving test coverage, reliability, and execution speed.

- Conduct code reviews for test scripts and contribute to establishing best practices, coding standards, and documentation guidelines within the QA function.

- Participate in sprint planning, stand-ups, and retrospectives, providing accurate effort estimates for testing tasks and contributing to continuous improvement of the development process.

- Monitor test results, generate test reports and metrics, and present findings clearly to technical and non-technical audiences to support informed decision-making.

- Stay current with evolving testing tools, frameworks, and industry practices, and proactively recommend improvements to the existing automation ecosystem.

- Understanding of AI hallucinations, biases, and limitations

- Prepare technical documentation and provide support for production systems.

Required Qualifications & Skills :

- Strong command of core Java concepts including OOP principles, multithreading, exception handling, collections, and design patterns, with the ability to write clean, maintainable, and efficient code.

- Hands-on experience with Spring and Spring Boot frameworks for building scalable, enterprise-grade applications, including familiarity with dependency injection, REST API development, and application configuration.

- Proficiency with Maven/Gradle for project build management, dependency resolution, and lifecycle automation in a Java ecosystem.

- Working knowledge of both relational databases (such as MySQL or PostgreSQL) and non-relational databases (such as MongoDB or Redis), including the ability to design schemas and write optimized queries.

- Experience with JPA (Java Persistence API) for ORM-based data access, including entity mapping, JPQL queries, and managing database transactions.

- Strong debugging skills with proficiency in Java debugging tools such as IntelliJ IDEA Debugger, JVisualVM, JProfiler, or similar, capable of diagnosing and resolving complex issues in a timely manner.

- Solid experience writing and maintaining test cases using JUnit and/or TestNG, including unit, integration, data-driven, and parameterized tests, with frameworks like Mockito for mocking dependencies.

- Deep understanding of testing methodologies in Java, including unit testing, integration testing, regression testing, and test reporting.

- Practical experience with Test-Driven Development (TDD), with the ability to write test cases before implementation to drive code design and ensure coverage.

- (Good to have) Familiarity with Selenium WebDriver for UI/end-to-end test automation would be a strong added advantage.

- Hands-on experience with AI assistants.

- Ability to craft clear, effective prompts to get accurate and useful outputs from LLMs.

- Ability to fact-check, refine, and validate AI-generated content before use.

- Understanding of AI hallucinations, biases, and limitations.

- Excellent communications skills, both verbal and written