Syed is available for hire
Hire SyedSyed Shams Elahi
Verified Expert in Engineering
QA Engineer and Developer
Dhaka, Dhaka Division, Bangladesh
Toptal member since February 18, 2026
Bio
Syed is a results-driven principal software development engineer in test (SDET) with more than 11 years of expertise in enterprise-scale testing automation and quality assurance. He specializes in developing robust automation frameworks, reducing testing time by 80% and improving efficiency by 30% across multiple projects.
Portfolio
All Generation Tech
TypeScript, Python, Automation, Playwright, Grafana k6, Locust, Postman, SQA...
AutomatedPros
Python, TypeScript, Automation, Playwright, Grafana k6, Locust, Postman, SQA...
EWN Bangladesh
TypeScript, Python, Automation, Playwright, Grafana k6, Locust, Postman, SQA...
Experience
- Postman - 11 years
- TypeScript - 11 years
- Software Engineering - 11 years
- Automation - 11 years
- Python - 11 years
- Grafana k6 - 9 years
- Locust - 7 years
- Playwright - 6 years
Preferred Environment
JavaScript, TypeScript, Windows, Linux, Visual Studio Code (VS Code), Python
The most amazing...
...solution I've built is a scalable QA automation framework that slashed regression from days to hours and stabilized releases.
Work Experience
Principal Software Development Engineer in Test (SDET)
2025 - PRESENT
All Generation Tech
- Directed a 21 – 50 person QA and SDET organization across multiple squads, standardized quality gates and review practices, and reduced production defect leakage by approximately 40%.
- Designed and delivered a scalable Playwright and TypeScript framework, cutting regression runtime by around 70%, reducing it from six to 1.8 hours, and raising CI pass rate to roughly 98%.
- Automated end-to-end critical workflows across insurance and finance products, expanding coverage to more than 3,500 scenarios and improving release confidence via risk-tiered suites.
- Built API functional coverage using Locust and scripted validations, adding over 1,200 assertions and preventing breaking changes through CI-enforced contract checks.
- Implemented performance testing with Grafana k6 and Locust, enforcing SLO thresholds and improving p95 latency by around 30% while increasing throughput by roughly 30%.
- Integrated automated tests into CI/CD with reporting and artifacts, saving approximately 30 hours per week of manual verification and accelerating release cadence from weekly to multiple releases a week.
- Created deterministic test data and environment utilities, including seed, resets, and reusable setups, reducing flaky failures by around 50% and cutting triage time by approximately 50%, from two to roughly one hour.
- Established quality dashboards, including pass rates, flakiness, defect trends, performance thresholds, improving stakeholder visibility, and driving data-backed go and no-go decisions.
- Mentored engineers and QA staff on automation patterns, code reviews, and debugging, increasing team delivery throughput by around 25%.
- Collaborated with product and engineering to translate requirements into automation-ready acceptance criteria, reducing rework by approximately 30%.
Technologies: TypeScript, Python, Automation, Playwright, Grafana k6, Locust, Postman, SQA, Django, FastAPI
Lead Software Quality Assurance Analyst
2024 - 2025
AutomatedPros
- Implemented parallel execution and sharding in Playwright CI, reducing end-to-end pipeline duration by approximately 55%, from 45 to roughly 20 minutes while maintaining approximately 98% reliability.
- Established a flaky test quarantine and classification workflow, cutting flaky-failure noise by around 60% and improving signal-to-noise for releases.
- Introduced test observability, including traces, videos, network logs, and failure buckets, and standardized bug templates, reducing mean time to diagnose from around 90 to 30 minutes.
- Developed reusable fixture-based setup flows and data builders, accelerating new test creation time by approximately 40% and improving maintainability across modules.
- Built resilient selector and page-object conventions such as stable locators and accessibility-first patterns, reducing locator-break incidents by around 35% after UI changes.
- Defined and enforced quality gates, including coverage thresholds, PR checks, and performance budgets, increasing green build confidence and reducing rollback events by approximately 25%.
- Partnered with engineering to shift-left validation, including unit, component, and API contract checks, preventing approximately 20 – 30% of defects from reaching end-to-end testing.
- Optimized test environments and data reset strategies, reducing environment-related failures by 45% and improving nightly suite consistency.
- Created a structured onboarding and internal enablement program for automation engineers, cutting ramp-up time for new team members from six to three weeks.
- Championed security and compliance-friendly testing practices such as secrets management, redacted logs, and masked personally identifiable information (PII), achieving audit-ready automation with zero credential leaks in repositories and CI.
Technologies: Python, TypeScript, Automation, Playwright, Grafana k6, Locust, Postman, SQA, Django, FastAPI
Senior Software Quality Assurance Engineer
2023 - 2024
EWN Bangladesh
- Owned end-to-end release readiness across squads, running go and no-go reviews and improving on-time delivery to over 95% of planned releases.
- Standardized defect triage and severity guidelines with engineering and product teams, reducing reopen rates by 30% and improving fix-cycle predictability.
- Implemented API mocking and service virtualization for unstable dependencies, unblocking automation and reducing environment dependency failures by approximately 40%.
- Built contract-testing checks into CI, including schema and backward-compat validations, preventing 10 – 20 breaking changes per quarter from reaching downstream teams.
- Created a risk-based test strategy (tier-0 smoke, tier-1 critical paths, tier-2 extended), cutting release validation time by 35% without sacrificing coverage.
- Instrumented performance baselines and regression alerts for key endpoints, detecting degradations within hours instead of days and reducing performance incidents by 25%.
- Developed a reusable test data management approach encompassing builders, factories, and cleanup hooks, reducing data collisions by 50% and improving parallel run success.
- Instituted coding standards and PR review checklists for test code, reducing maintenance overhead by 20% and improving long-term suite health.
- Drove cross-team quality initiatives such as bug bashes, quality weeks, and retros on escapes, increasing critical-path defect discovery pre-release by 30%.
- Delivered executive-ready quality reporting encompassing KPIs, trends, hotspots, and performance budgets, aligning stakeholders and reducing status-meeting time by 50% through self-serve dashboards.
Technologies: TypeScript, Python, Automation, Playwright, Grafana k6, Locust, Postman, SQA, Django, FastAPI
Senior Software Quality Assurance Engineer
2022 - 2023
Bevy Commerce
- Refactored legacy test suites into modular, domain-based packages, reducing duplicate code by 35% and improving maintainability across teams.
- Implemented cross-browser and device coverage in CI (Chromium, Firefox, WebKit, and viewport tiers), raising UI compatibility coverage to more than 90% of supported targets.
- Built role-based test utilities, including admin, agent, underwriter, and customer personas, increasing scenario depth by 40% and reducing setup time per test.
- Introduced advanced reporting (HTML, trace links, and screenshots) with auto-tagging by feature and owner, cutting investigation time by approximately 45% for failed runs.
- Established a test ownership model with clear SLAs for fixing broken tests, reducing broken-suite downtime from days to hours.
- Developed migration plans to modern tooling such as Playwright, TypeScript, k6, and Locust, and delivered phased roll-outs, reducing disruption while improving automation ROI by 30%.
- Created a reliable nightly and pre-merge test strategy, catching more than 70% of regressions before release branches were cut.
- Optimized CI resource usage, including smart test selection, caching, and artifact pruning, reducing CI compute cost by approximately 20% while keeping coverage stable.
- Implemented centralized secrets and environment configuration management, eliminating credential exposure risk and standardizing setup across 100% of pipelines.
- Partnered with engineering to improve application testability (IDs, logging, feature flags), reducing automation brittleness and lowering UI-test flake rate by 30%.
Technologies: TypeScript, Python, Automation, Playwright, Grafana k6, Locust, Postman, FastAPI, SQA, Django
Software Quality Assurance Engineer
2020 - 2022
Bit Mascot
- Defined service-level quality targets, including error budgets, p95/p99 latency, and availability, and aligned test suites to SLOs, reducing release risk and last-minute rollbacks by 20 –30%.
- Built a deterministic golden data approach for critical flows (seeded users, policies, and orders), reducing non-reproducible defects by approximately 40% and improving triage speed.
- Implemented visual regression and UI snapshot checks for high-risk screens, catching styling and layout regressions pre-merge and reducing UI production issues by 15 – 25%.
- Introduced API reliability testing (timeouts, retries, idempotency, and rate limits) and validated resiliency behaviors, reducing incident frequency from integration failures by 20%.
- Developed a structured incident and defect postmortem loop, including root cause, prevention actions, and automation additions, reducing repeat-issue recurrence by 30 – 40%.
- Created a quality by design checklist for new features such as testability hooks, logging, stable selectors, and feature flags, reducing automation rework by 25%.
- Built a self-serve QA toolkit encompassing templates, generators, linting rules, and example specs, accelerating new project kickoff time by 30% across squads.
- Implemented negative and edge-case suites. including validation, boundary values, permission abuse, and concurrency, increasing defect discovery in early test stages by 25 – 35%.
- Standardized cross-team test documentation, such as runbooks, troubleshooting guides, and release checklists, reducing dependency on key individuals and improving operational continuity.
- Automated smoke validations for every deployment, detecting critical regressions within 10 minutes of release and reducing incident MTTR by 25%.
Technologies: JavaScript, Python, Automation, Selenium, Grafana k6, Locust, Postman, SQA, Django, FastAPI
Lead Software Quality Assurance Engineer
2016 - 2020
WeDaeDallas LLC
- Implemented tag-based test selection, such as smoke, critical, regression, and performance in CI, enabling targeted runs and cutting PR feedback time by 40%.
- Introduced data-driven testing patterns, including factories, builders, and parameterization, increasing scenario coverage by 30% without proportional code growth.
- Developed reusable API clients and helpers for tests, reducing duplicated API-call code by 50% and improving readability and consistency.
- Created a defect prevention backlog tied to escaped defects, delivering automation additions that reduced repeat escapes by 35% quarter-over-quarter.
- Validated authorization and role-based access controls across products, closing high-risk permission gaps and preventing privilege-related defects before release.
- Implemented stability improvements for end-to-end suites encompassing smart waits, network-idle guards, and deterministic navigation, reducing flaky timeouts by approximately 45%.
- Built CI artifact standards such as trace, video, screenshot, and log bundles and a unified naming convention, improving troubleshooting speed and handoffs across teams.
- Partnered with engineers to add test hooks and feature flags for controlled experiments, enabling safe rollouts and reducing rollback probability by 20%.
- Established performance smoke tests on key endpoints per release, preventing latency regressions and improving p99 latency by 15 – 25% over time.
- Coached teams on writing automation-ready acceptance criteria and edge cases, reducing requirement ambiguity and cutting QA cycle churn by 20%.
Technologies: Python, TypeScript, Automation, Grafana k6, Locust, Postman, SQA, Django, FastAPI, Cypress
Experience
Enterprise-grade Test Automation Framework
I built a highly modular, scalable, and reliable test automation framework using Playwright and TypeScript for modern web applications. I designed a clean architecture that separates test intent from implementation via reusable page objects/components, business workflows (setups), typed fixtures, and centralized utilities (waits, assertions, data builders, API clients).
The framework emphasizes stability through resilient locator strategy, smart synchronization, trace/video/screenshot capture on failure, consistent logging, and flaky-test controls (retries, quarantining, tagging). It supports parallel execution, cross-browser coverage, environment-based configuration with secrets, and CI-ready reporting (HTML/Allure-style artifacts).
The result is a production-ready automation platform that teams can extend quickly while keeping tests maintainable, fast, and trustworthy.
The framework emphasizes stability through resilient locator strategy, smart synchronization, trace/video/screenshot capture on failure, consistent logging, and flaky-test controls (retries, quarantining, tagging). It supports parallel execution, cross-browser coverage, environment-based configuration with secrets, and CI-ready reporting (HTML/Allure-style artifacts).
The result is a production-ready automation platform that teams can extend quickly while keeping tests maintainable, fast, and trustworthy.
Scalable API Load and Performance Testing Framework
I designed and implemented a production-ready performance and reliability testing framework using Locust (Python) to validate APIs under realistic traffic patterns and failure modes.
The framework is built for modularity and scale: reusable typed API clients, configurable user journeys (tasks), pluggable data feeders (CSV, JSON, and Faker), and environment-driven configuration for seamless runs across local, staging, and CI environments. I added strict SLO/threshold gating (latency percentiles, error rate, throughput), automated warm-up, ramp, and ramp-down profiles, and robust correlation/auth handling (JWT, OAuth, and session tokens) to simulate real users accurately.
Test runs produce actionable artifacts, including structured logs, summary reports, and trend-ready metrics, making it easy to diagnose bottlenecks and regressions. Integrated the suite into CI/CD so performance checks run consistently and failures block releases when service health degrades.
The framework is built for modularity and scale: reusable typed API clients, configurable user journeys (tasks), pluggable data feeders (CSV, JSON, and Faker), and environment-driven configuration for seamless runs across local, staging, and CI environments. I added strict SLO/threshold gating (latency percentiles, error rate, throughput), automated warm-up, ramp, and ramp-down profiles, and robust correlation/auth handling (JWT, OAuth, and session tokens) to simulate real users accurately.
Test runs produce actionable artifacts, including structured logs, summary reports, and trend-ready metrics, making it easy to diagnose bottlenecks and regressions. Integrated the suite into CI/CD so performance checks run consistently and failures block releases when service health degrades.
Education
2016 - 2019
Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science
Independent University, Bangladesh (IUB) - Dhaka, Bangladesh
Skills
Libraries/APIs
Playwright, Node.js
Tools
Grafana k6, Postman, Git, Observability Tools, Logging, Allure Report
Languages
Python, JavaScript, TypeScript, HTML
Frameworks
Locust, Django, Selenium, Cypress, JSON Web Tokens (JWT)
Paradigms
Automation, Load Testing, Page Object Model (POM), Soak Testing, Stress Testing
Platforms
Windows, Linux, Visual Studio Code (VS Code), Docker
Other
Software Engineering, Systems Engineering, Development, SQA, FastAPI, PNPM, Test Automation Architecture, UI Testing, REST API Clients, Cross-browser Testing, Reporting, Distributed Tracing, ESLint/Prettier, Flaky Test Management, Agile QA Practices, Performance Engineering, Test Data Generation, User Journeys, Low Latency, CI/CD Pipelines, OAuth, Metrics, Logging & Reporting, Regression Performance Gates, Capacity Testing, GitHub Actions, Sharding, Monitoring, API Testing, Microsoft Component Object Model (COM), Screenshots, Videos, Test Data, Authentication
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