Associate Specialist, Tester

Job description

Job Description The Opportunity Based in Hyderabad, join a global healthcare biopharma company and be part of a 130- year legacy of success backed by ethical integrity, forward momentum, and an inspiring mission to achieve new milestones in global healthcare. Be part of an organisation driven by digital technology and data-backed approaches that support a diversified portfolio of prescription medicines, vaccines, and animal health products. Drive innovation and execution excellence. Be a part of a team with passion for using data, analytics, and insights to drive decision-making, and which creates custom software, allowing us to tackle some of the world's greatest health threats. Our Technology Centers focus on creating a space where teams can come together to deliver business solutions that save and improve lives. An integral part of our company’s IT operating model, Tech Centers are globally distributed locations where each IT division has employees to enable our digital transformation journey and drive business outcomes. These locations, in addition to the other sites, are essential to supporting our business and strategy. A focused group of leaders in each Tech Center helps to ensure we can manage and improve each location, from investing in growth, success, and well-being of our people, to making sure colleagues from each IT division feel a sense of belonging to managing critical emergencies. And together, we must leverage the strength of our team to collaborate globally to optimize connections and share best practices across the Tech Centers. #HYDIT2025 Role Overview The Test Automation Engineer is a high-impact individual contributor responsible for designing, building, and maintaining scalable test automation frameworks across functional, regression, performance, and AI-assisted testing domains. This role requires both deep technical depth — hands-on coding, CI/CD pipeline integration, and framework engineering — and strategic breadth, including test planning, toolchain governance, and mentoring junior QA engineers. The ideal candidate has extensive experience with industry-standard tools such as Robot Framework, Tosca, Xray, JIRA, HP ALM/QC, and GitHub, and is actively exploring or applying AI/ML in test automation workflows. You are someone who treats quality as a first-class engineering concern and can work seamlessly across Agile, SAFe, and DevOps delivery models What will you do in this role Automation Framework Engineering: Design, build, and maintain scalable, reusable automation frameworks using Robot Framework, Tosca, Selenium, and API testing tools across web, mobile, and enterprise applications. AI-Augmented Testing: Integrate AI/ML capabilities into the test automation lifecycle — including intelligent test generation, self-healing scripts, anomaly detection, and predictive failure analysis. Test Case Design & Documentation: Author comprehensive manual and automated test cases aligned to business requirements, user stories, and acceptance criteria; maintain test repositories in Xray and HP ALM. Regression Testing: Own and execute end-to-end regression suites; triage failures, root-cause defects, and ensure suite health across sprint boundaries and major releases. Load & Performance Testing: Design and execute load, stress, soak, and spike tests using tools such as JMeter, Gatling, or k6; analyze results and recommend optimizations. CI/CD Integration: Embed automated test suites into GitHub Actions, Jenkins, or equivalent pipelines; manage branching strategies and test artifact versioning in GitHub. Manual & Exploratory Testing: Execute structured and exploratory manual testing for complex scenarios, edge cases, and new feature validation where automation coverage is nascent. Test Management & Reporting: Manage test cycles, track coverage, and generate quality metrics in JIRA, Xray, and HP ALM/QC; present testing status and risk to stakeholders. Toolchain Strategy: Evaluate, recommend, and implement testing tools and frameworks; establish standards, guidelines, and best practices across the QA function. What should you have Bachelors’ degree in Information Technology, Computer Science or any Technology stream. AUTOMATION ENGINEERING: Hands-on experience building and maintaining automation frameworks from scratch Robot Framework — keywords, libraries, resource files, custom Python libraries Selenium WebDriver / Playwright / Cypress for UI automation REST API & GraphQL test automation (RestAssured, Postman, Robot RequestsLibrary) Data-driven, keyword-driven, and hybrid framework design patterns Page Object Model (POM) and modular test architecture TESTING DISCIPLINES: Comprehensive regression testing strategy, suite maintenance, and failure triage Manual testing — test plan authoring, exploratory testing, boundary/equivalence testing Load, performance, stress, and spike testing design and analysis Integration, system, UAT, and smoke testing across multi-tier architectures Risk-based testing and defect prioritization BDD / TDD methodologies and collaboration with product teams Cross-browser, cross-platform, and mobile testing experience SCRIPTING & PROGRAMMING: Proficient in Python (primary) and/or Java for automation scripting Shell scripting for CI/CD orchestration and test utility tooling SQL — query writing for data validation and database testing JSON / XML / YAML — config, schema validation, API payload handling Version control with Git — branching, merging, PRs, and repo management AI IN TEST AUTOMATION Practical experience applying AI/ML to test generation, prioritization, or maintenance Familiarity with self-healing test frameworks and intelligent locator strategies AI-assisted test case generation using LLMs or specialized QA AI tools Using AI for log analysis, anomaly detection, and failure classification Awareness of generative AI in exploratory testing and coverage gap identification AI in Testing — Deep Dive Expectations Hands-on use of AI-powered testing platforms (e.g., Functionize, Testim, mabl, Applitools, or equivalent) to reduce test maintenance overhead Ability to prompt and fine-tune LLMs for test case generation from user stories, BDD scenarios, and requirements documents Experience implementing or evaluating self-healing locator mechanisms that automatically adapt to UI changes Designing AI-assisted flaky test detection pipelines that analyze test result patterns over time Integrating AI-based visual regression testing tools into existing automation frameworks Secondary Skills: PROCESS & METHODOLOGY: Agile / Scrum — active participation in sprint ceremonies, backlog refinement SAFe (Scaled Agile Framework) — system-level testing, PI planning integration DevOps / Shift-Left testing practices Test estimation, test planning, and STLC governance Risk management and quality gate definition ARCHITECTURE & INFRASTRUCTURE: Microservices and service-mesh testing strategies Containerized test execution using Docker and Kubernetes Cloud environments — AWS, Azure, or GCP test infrastructure setup Selenium Grid / BrowserStack / Sauce Labs for distributed execution Message queue and event-driven system testing (Kafka, RabbitMQ) Who we are We are known as Merck & Co., Inc., Rahway, New Jersey, USA in the United States and Canada and MSD everywhere else. For more than a century, we have been bringing forward medicines and vaccines for many of the world's most challenging diseases. Today, our company continues to be at the forefront of research to deliver innovative health solutions and advance the prevention and treatment of diseases that threaten people and animals around the world. What we look for Imagine getting up in the morning for a job as important as helping to save and improve lives around the world. Here, you have that opportunity. You can put your empathy, creativity, digital mastery, or scientific genius to work in collaboration with a diverse group of colleagues who pursue and bring hope to countless peo