Professional Profile

Sudarsh M.
Sathianathan

Principal Quality Engineer · QA Engineering Manager · Bengaluru, India

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13+
Years Experience
Across SaaS, media, healthcare & compliance platforms
50%
Defect Reduction
Production client-reported defects at SpotDraft
60%
Faster Regression
Through CI-integrated automation frameworks
9-in-10
Releases Stable
Rollback rate from 7-in-10 to fewer than 1-in-10
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I'm a Principal Quality Engineer and QA Engineering Manager with 13+ years of hands-on experience building automation frameworks, embedding quality gates into CI/CD pipelines, and validating complex enterprise SaaS workflows. I've led quality engineering from zero to scale — joining organisations as the first QA hire and building teams and processes that deliver measurable, lasting impact.

My approach is simple: quality is a leadership decision, not a testing phase. I work closely with Product, Engineering, and Design to make quality a shared responsibility — embedded at every layer, from the first requirement conversation to the last production deployment.

01

Experience

QA Engineering Manager
SpotDraft — AI-powered Contract Lifecycle Management
Apr 2022 – Jun 2025
Enterprise SaaS · Joined as first QA hire · Scaled to 12-member team
  • Built the entire QA function from zero — strategy, hiring, frameworks, and culture — while simultaneously owning hands-on quality engineering for a high-availability enterprise platform.
  • 50% reduction in production defects and 100% increase in internally caught bugs through comprehensive regression coverage and structured test strategies.
  • Rollback rate reduced from 7-in-10 to fewer than 1-in-10 by instituting a bi-weekly release governance model and CI-integrated quality gates.
  • 60% faster regression cycles through Cypress UI and Rest Assured API automation frameworks integrated directly into CI/CD pipelines.
  • Owned quality strategy for VerifAI — SpotDraft's AI-powered contract review feature — designing edge case suites across diverse contract types.
  • Led end-to-end hiring across all levels and skill sets; owned performance evaluations and career development for every team member.
QA Lead
Quintype — Digital Publishing Platform
Jun 2018 – Mar 2022
Enterprise SaaS · Global Media Organizations · High-traffic products
  • Owned quality strategy across multiple high-traffic product lines — personally designing and executing test suites across smoke, regression, integration, and UAT.
  • Built Cypress UI and Rest Assured API automation frameworks; integrated into CircleCI for continuous validation.
  • Introduced visual regression testing for layout-heavy theming platforms and automated Lighthouse performance audits via cron jobs.
  • Designed a competency matrix to standardise QA skill levels and career progression; mentored engineers through growth check-ins.
Senior QA Engineer
BigBinary — Healthcare, Logistics & Compliance Platforms
Apr 2015 – Jun 2018
Custom Software Development · Multiple product verticals
  • Built automation test suites from scratch using Selenium and Robot Framework across multiple products.
  • Designed load and stress test suites using Apache JMeter to validate system performance under high traffic.
  • Validated WCAG AA accessibility compliance in collaboration with UX teams.
QA Engineer
Bang The Table — Community Engagement Platform
May 2012 – Mar 2015
Early career · Automation foundations
  • Set up Jenkins CI pipelines for automated cross-browser Selenium test execution.
  • Implemented JMeter-based performance and scalability testing; validated AA accessibility standards.
02

Core Skills

Automation Frameworks
PlaywrightCypressSeleniumRest AssuredRobot FrameworkCucumber
Testing Practices
BDDTDDATDDRisk-based TestingVisual RegressionPerformance TestingAccessibility (WCAG)
CI/CD & Cloud
GitHub ActionsJenkinsCircleCIDockerAWSGCP
Languages & Tools
TypeScriptJavaScriptJavaPythonSQLPostmanJMeter
Leadership & Process
Team BuildingHiring & MentoringAgile / SAFeQA StrategyRelease GovernanceRCA
AI & Modern QA
Claude CodeAI-assisted TestingAllure ReportingTestmoGraphQL Testing
03

Education

Bachelor of Technology (B.Tech) — Computer Science
Kannur University, Kerala, India
B.Tech · CS

Open to the right opportunity

Principal QA / Quality Engineering Manager roles where quality is treated as a strategic function — not an afterthought.