Senior Software QA Engineer

Job Title: Senior Software QA EngineerLocation: Remote (India Based Only)Hiring Manager: Senior QA Engineering ManagerEstimated salary range: INR 3,100,000.00 - INR 5,000,000.00• The salary offered for this position will be based on a candidate’s experience and skill demonstrated during interviews and other evaluations
Position Overview:Ocient is seeking a Senior Software QA Engineer with strong expertise in database system. This hands-on role provides the opportunity to design and lead end-to-end testing initiatives that validate and enhance Ocient's database engine—ensuring stability, performance, scalability as the platform grows. You should be: Passionate about testing complex, large-scale distributed database systems, with a focus on functional correctness, stress/scale and performance.
Ready to validate new database features end-to-end—from test planning and execution to resource management—and share results that inform product direction. Interested in new workload generation and understanding how they target performance and stress components of the database, developing infrastructure to measure key performance metrics in a database to understand and identify bottlenecks/soft spots.
Highly collaborative, proactive with strong communication skills and the ability to work independently to deliver well-designed, meaningful test outcomes.
Responsibilities:

• Design and execute comprehensive test plans and automated suites to validate new features/optimizations for or database as a system.
• Develop, run, and analyze regression tests targeting the system-level database functionality — ensuring functional stability, scalability, and performance.
• Collaborate strongly with Development team to implement tests onto nightly CI/QA infrastructure, improve existing test coverage and analysis tooling.
• Own end-to-end evaluation of Ocient's platform components, partnering across teams to identify behavioral/functional issues, correctness gaps, and opportunities for performance optimization.
• Provide technical leadership in defining test strategies, frameworks, and best practices for validating complex optimization and execution scenarios.
• Work cross-functionally with engineering leadership and internal stakeholders to align on feature design goals, ensure test completeness, and drive timely resolution of issues.
• Lead the evolution of database testing infrastructure to support scalability, reliability, and reproducibility across functional and system-level tests.
• Act as a subject matter expert for owned components, partnering with customer operations and development teams on escalated issues and validation.
• Mentor junior engineers, fostering expertise in database testing methodologies.

Ideal Qualifications:

• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or equivalent.
• 4–6 years of experience in database development, administration, or QA engineering, ideally focused on testing and validating query processing behavior and database system components.
• Deep understanding of relational and distributed database systems, with strong skills in SQL query design, execution, and analysis.
• Proven experience in test planning, designing, and executing automated, reliable test frameworks and workloads for databases.
• Strong QA and debugging skills with the ability to trace issues across query planning, execution, and component interactions within the database engine.
• Solid Linux expertise — comfortable monitoring resource utilization, analyzing logs, and understanding how system-level factors influence database behavior.
• Proficiency in Python for test automation, diagnostics, and feature validation. Hands-on experience with JIRA, test case management system and version control tools.
• Familiarity with cloud environments (AWS or GCP), including deployment and monitoring.
• Experience using AI coding assistants (e.g. Claude Code, Cursor, Windsurf) to author and maintain tests, with the judgment to review generated tests for vacuous assertions and hidden flakiness.
• Ability to analyze complex test results, interpret query execution behavior, and derive meaningful insights through visualization and test data analysis. Excellent written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to convey technical findings clearly to diverse audiences.