open to engineering manager roles · agentic ai / genai / saas
Quality is the spec nobody wrote down.
QA leader with 16+ years building quality engineering strategies across Banking, Financial Services, and Early Education. Currently designing intelligent, self-adapting test frameworks for agentic AI and GenAI-driven systems.
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madhu kesarkar — qa & engineering leadership
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Senior QA Engineer @ brightwheel
✓ open to Engineering Manager roles — Agentic AI / GenAI / SaaS
- 16+ yrs in QA / QE
- 3 domains — Banking, Healthcare, EdTech
- 4 companies
- GCP Associate Cloud Engineer certified
QA leader with 16+ years of experience building quality engineering strategies across Banking, Financial Services, and Early Education domains. Currently focused on Agentic AI and Generative AI-driven test automation, designing frameworks that bring intelligent, self-adapting testing to complex enterprise systems. Passionate about bridging traditional QA rigor with next-generation AI capabilities to drive faster, smarter, and more reliable software delivery.
Cloud & AI
- AWS Bedrock / GenAI
- GCP AI Platform & GKE
- Agentic AI Testing
- Prompt Engineering
Automation & Testing
- PACT Contract Testing
- Selenium · Cypress · WebdriverIO · Appium
- API Testing — Postman, REST, SOAP
- Mobile Automation — iOS & Android
- Microservices QA
Tooling & Observability
- CI/CD — Jenkins & GitHub Actions
- Splunk · Dynatrace · New Relic
- Linear
Currently
- Leading end-to-end QA strategy for brightwheel's EdTech SaaS platform, serving 1M+ users
- Designing AI-assisted testing workflows and exploring agentic QA pipeline concepts
- Exploring Engineering Manager roles in GenAI / SaaS, in India and internationally
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Oct 2024 — Present Current
Senior Quality Assurance Engineer
brightwheel · EdTech SaaS
- Leading end-to-end QA strategy for a high-growth EdTech SaaS platform serving 1M+ users
- Designing scalable automation frameworks and driving AI-assisted testing workflows
- Collaborating with engineering, product, and platform teams to embed quality into CI/CD delivery pipelines
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Jul 2021 — Oct 2024
Quality Engineering Specialist / Technical Lead
Wipro · client: Lloyds Banking Group
- Architected QE strategy for a legacy monolith → microservices migration on GCP, including security testing (Burp Suite) and phased rollout
- Led a team building PACT contract tests across provider/consumer API services, ensuring reliability in a distributed architecture
- Gained hands-on experience with AWS Generative AI principles; integrated AI-driven insights into testing pipelines
- Designed automation strategies using Appium (XCUITest/Espresso), Cypress, WebdriverIO, and Cucumber BDD for mobile and web
- Set up Jenkins Scripted Pipelines for automated test execution, dependency management, and HTML reporting
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Aug 2022 — Oct 2024
Quality Assurance Test Lead
Wipro · client: Lloyds Banking Group, London
- Managed a cross-functional QA team for high-value banking digital transformation programmes
- Oversaw mobile app releases to the App Store and route-to-live activities for critical financial products
- Delivered Test Strategy, Test Planning, and Test Summary Reports to C-level and delivery leadership
- Led accessibility testing initiatives, including VoiceOver, speech-to-text, and keyboard navigation compliance
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Oct 2018 — Jun 2021
Senior Test Engineer
Wipro · client: Lloyds Banking Group
- Tested high-value features (Quick Links, Sort Code DB, AirWatch legacy removal) on banking mobile apps using Perfecto Cloud and Appium
- Worked closely with Release and Security teams to ensure data protection and regulatory compliance
- Contributed to sprint planning, stakeholder coordination, effort estimation, and risk management
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Aug 2017 — Sep 2018
Senior Software Engineer
Philips · Healthcare
- Managed CSV validation (QAIS forms, OQ Test Protocols) in Valgenesis for regulated healthcare software
- Handled complex data modelling with SQL Developer and performance testing; complaint tracking in TrackWise
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Mar 2013 — Feb 2017
Test Coordinator
Capital One UK
- Developed automated test suites for data warehouse platforms (Teradata/Oracle) and implemented PCI DSS compliance testing for BI platforms
- Performed source-to-target data validation, ETL testing, and file-to-table load verification using SQL
Education
Bachelor of Commerce — Accounting & Computer Science, Bangalore University
Certifications
- Google Associate Cloud Engineer (ACE)
- Generative AI Fundamentals — Google Cloud
- Getting Started with Google Kubernetes Engine
- Essential Google Cloud Infrastructure: Core Services
- AWS Generative AI — Core Principles & Practical Applications
- Test Case Management — Fundamentals & TestRail
Notes on quality engineering in the agentic era — queued and coming soon.
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published
Building a QA Agent Pipeline: Early Lessons from a POC
What it looks like to route a requirement through a requirements-reviewer, test-planner, executor, bug-analyser, and reporter agent — and where the pipeline still breaks on real projects.
Read the full article → -
queued
PACT at Scale: Lessons from Enterprise Banking
How contract testing held together a microservices estate across a banking platform migration — and where it still fell short.
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queued
What Test Leadership Looks Like in a GenAI Org
How the QA lead role changes when the system under test is non-deterministic.
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queued
Evaluating RAG Pipelines: A QA-First Framework
Retrieval quality, hallucination checks, and regression testing for RAG-based products.
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queued
CI/CD for QA Leads: Owning the Pipeline, Not Just the Tests
What QA leadership looks like when you own gate criteria inside the deployment pipeline itself.