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.

  • 16+ yrs in QA / QE
  • 3 domains — Banking, Healthcare, EdTech
  • 4 companies
  • GCP Associate Cloud Engineer certified
Madhu Kesarkar
Madhu Kesarkar

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
  1. 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
    • Agentic QA
    • SaaS
    • AI-Assisted Testing
  2. 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
    • Microservices
    • PACT
    • GenAI
  3. 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
    • Banking
    • Accessibility
    • Leadership
  4. 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
    • Mobile Automation
    • Banking
  5. 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
    • Healthcare Systems
    • Regulated Software
  6. 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
    • Data Warehouse
    • PCI DSS
    • ETL

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.

  • 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.

    • Agentic AI
    • QE Leadership
    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.

    • Contract Testing
  • queued

    What Test Leadership Looks Like in a GenAI Org

    How the QA lead role changes when the system under test is non-deterministic.

    • QE Leadership
  • queued

    Evaluating RAG Pipelines: A QA-First Framework

    Retrieval quality, hallucination checks, and regression testing for RAG-based products.

    • Agentic AI
  • 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.

    • CI/CD

Let's talk quality, GenAI, or your next hire.