Santhosh Somasundaram

• Quality Assurance Leadership: Managed end-to-end QA processes, including test planning, execution, and reporting, ensuring high-quality products across multiple releases.
• Leadership in Cloud-Based QA Automation and Deployment: Led QA efforts for cloud-hosted applications by overseeing end-to-end testing strategies and deploying automated testing frameworks. Ensured seamless deployment across multi-cloud environments (AWS, GCP), and maintained compliance with CI/CD pipelines through effective cross-functional collaboration.
• Leadership in Product Development and Quality-Instrumental in conceptualizing and launching a product from inception, building a high-performing QA team to support its growth and scalability. Led as the release manager, ensuring timely and quality delivery.
• Automation Strategy & Guidance: Directed automation initiatives, guiding engineers in Cypress automation,streamlined testing for greater efficiency. Developed a strategic plan to prioritize test automation for repetitive and regression scenarios, reducing manual testing efforts to as little as 20%. This approach ensured optimal resource allocation and faster release cycles while maintaining high-quality standards.
• Product Planning for Generative AI: Involved in the strategic planning of a product powered by Generative AI for IT operations and semantic search.
• Process & Team Building: Built QA processes from scratch, covering requirements gathering to release management, and led a team of 12 QA professionals, including manual and automation testers.
• Achieved significant cost and time savings by leveraging automation tools:Led a successful POC with the Testim automation tool, automating 70% of the product’s test cases post-POC, which reduced manual regression by 3 hours per resource per cycle. This initiative cut manual testing costs by 60% during regression cycle , optimized testing efficiency, and saved 20 hours per sprint through streamlined test execution and defect management.
• Hands-On Testing: Directly involved in end-to-end functional testing, UAT, regression testing, database testing, and pipeline testing to ensure product quality and reliability, while setting a standard for thoroughness and attention to detail in testing processes.
• Cross-Functional Collaboration: Coordinated with development, product, and operations teams to identify and resolve issues early, reducing risks and enhancing release timelines.
• Reduced defect leakage to production by 50% over a 3-month period by implementing risk-based test case prioritization and focusing on critical application areas.
• Defect Tracking & Management: Proficient in JIRA for defect tracking, issue prioritization, and backlog grooming, resulting in improved resolution rates.
• Browser and API Testing: Experienced in cross-browser testing using BrowserStack and API testing with Postman and Swagger.
• Stakeholder Coordination: Regularly collaborated with stakeholders, including CPO and CTO, for strategic alignment on product and quality goals.
• Metrics and Reporting: Developed and shared QA metrics with stakeholders, tracking quality trends, release readiness, and improvement areas.

Diverse Industry Experience: Experience in Telecom, Healthcare, Fintech; worked with CRMs like Salesforce and Redtail and on SaaS products.

• End-to-End QA Ownership: Managed QA processes for EPM, ensuring product quality and compliance with healthcare standards.
  Hands-On Testing: Actively engaged in comprehensive testing, including functional, UAT, regression, database, and API testing, to uphold product quality and reliability, consistently setting a high standard for precision and thoroughness in all testing phases.
  Test Planning & Reporting: Developed and presented strategic QA metrics, highlighting quality trends to executive leadership.
  BDD Framework Development: Actively involved in high-level strategy and approach for implementing a BDD framework, fostering collaboration across QA, development, and product teams.x`

• Manual Testing Expertise: Performed comprehensive functional, regression, and system integration testing, ensuring applications met quality standards and were free from defects before release
• Test Case Design & Execution: Created, executed, and maintained detailed test cases based on requirements and user stories, consistently identifying and reporting defects for timely resolution
• Defect Tracking & Reporting: Utilized defect tracking tools like JIRA to log and manage bugs, ensuring clear communication between teams and facilitating efficient resolution of issues
• High-Level Security Testing: Actively participated in the high-level approach to security testing, identifying potential vulnerabilities and ensuring applications met necessary security standards and compliance requirements

• PL/SQL Development: Gained hands-on experience in writing and optimizing PL/SQL queries, stored procedures, functions, and triggers to support efficient data manipulation and retrieval
• Database Management: Assisted in database design and maintenance, ensuring the integrity, performance, and security of data while implementing complex data transformations
• SQL Query Optimization: Contributed to the optimization of SQL queries by analyzing execution plans and applying indexing techniques to improve performance and reduce response times