Technical Lead

Location: Noida Berger Tower, India

Thales is a global technology leader trusted by governments, institutions, and enterprises to tackle their most demanding challenges. From quantum applications and artificial intelligence to cybersecurity and 6G innovation, our solutions empower critical decisions rooted in human intelligence. Operating at the forefront of aerospace and space, cybersecurity and digital identity, we’re driven by a mission to build a future we can all trust.

Present in India since 1953, Thales is headquartered in Noida and has other operational offices and sites spread across Delhi, Gurugram, Bengaluru and Mumbai, among others. Over 2200 employees are working with Thales and its joint ventures in India. Since the beginning, Thales has been playing an essential role in India’s growth story by sharing its technologies and expertise in Defence, Aerospace and Cyber & Digital sectors. Thales has two engineering competence centres in India - one in Noida focused on Cyber & Digital business, while the one in Bengaluru focuses on hardware, software and systems engineering capabilities for both the civil and defence sectors, serving global needs. The Group has also established an MRO (Maintenance, Repair & Overhaul) facility in Gurugram to provide comprehensive avionics maintenance and repair services to Indian airlines and support the growth of the local aviation industry.

Job Summary

As a Quality Engineer Technical Lead, you will be expected to lead the quality engineering strategy for the team with strong ownership of automation, performance validation, test reliability, and production-quality observability. You will drive and maintain the Automation Suite framework used across the team, define scalable automation practices, strengthen regression and integration coverage, and ensure that quality gates are embedded effectively across delivery pipelines. The role requires strong hands-on exposure to performance testing, troubleshooting distributed applications in Kubernetes environments, and using observability tools such as Datadog and logging frameworks to diagnose issues, improve system reliability, and support faster root-cause analysis. Along with individual contribution, you will mentor engineers, guide test design, improve engineering productivity, support customer escalations, and continuously enhance the overall quality posture of the product.

Job Requirement and Responsibilities

• The Quality Engineer Technical Lead will be responsible for leading the quality engineering charter for the team, including automation strategy, test framework ownership, performance validation, release quality, and continuous improvement of testing practices.
• Own, maintain, and evolve the Automation Suite framework used by the whole team, ensuring that it is scalable, reliable, maintainable, and easy for engineers to extend across functional, regression, integration, and API test scenarios.
• Define automation best practices, coding standards, reusable utilities, test data strategies, reporting mechanisms, and execution patterns that improve team productivity and reduce manual validation effort.
• Build and strengthen a robust suite of performance tests covering key product workflows, scalability scenarios, load profiles, reliability checks, and performance regression detection.
• Work closely with development, DevOps, and product teams to embed quality gates into CI/CD pipelines and ensure that automation, regression, and performance feedback is available early in the delivery lifecycle.
• Provide strong troubleshooting support for issues observed in Kubernetes-based deployments, including pod failures, service connectivity, resource constraints, configuration issues, and environment-related problems.
• Use observability platforms such as Datadog, application logs, metrics, dashboards, traces, and logging frameworks to perform root-cause analysis and support faster resolution of production and pre-production issues.
• Mentor quality engineers and developers on automation design, testability, performance analysis, defect investigation, and engineering practices that improve overall product quality.
• Support customer escalations by reproducing issues, analyzing logs and telemetry, validating fixes, and ensuring relevant automated coverage is added to prevent recurrence.
• Drive continuous improvements in automation reliability, execution speed, test coverage, performance benchmarking, observability, and quality engineering processes.

Job Knowledge, Skill and Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in computer science, Computer Engineering, Electronics and Communication, or a related discipline, with 7+ years of experience in quality engineering, test automation, performance testing, and technical leadership.
• Strong hands-on experience in designing, developing, maintaining, and scaling automation frameworks for API, UI, integration, regression, and end-to-end test coverage.
• Proven ability to lead an Automation Suite framework for a team or program, including framework architecture, reusable components, test orchestration, reporting, maintainability, and adoption by multiple engineers.
• Good programming skills in Java, Python, JavaScript, or a comparable language used for automation development, test utilities, scripting, and framework enhancements.
• Strong experience with performance testing tools and practices, including load testing, scalability testing, baseline creation, bottleneck identification, trend analysis, and performance regression validation.
• Good troubleshooting exposure in Kubernetes-based environments, including deployments, pods, services, ingress, configuration, resource utilization, logs, and common runtime issues.
• Hands-on exposure to observability and monitoring tools such as Datadog, with the ability to analyze dashboards, metrics, traces, alerts, and service health indicators.
• Strong understanding of logging frameworks and log analysis practices to support debugging, defect triaging, root-cause analysis, and production issue investigation.
• Experience integrating automation suites with CI/CD pipelines and ensuring automated quality gates are reliable, actionable, and aligned with release expectations.
• Exposure to cloud-native applications, microservices, Docker, Kubernetes, and distributed system behavior will be an important factor.
• Strong analytical mindset with the ability to connect automation failures, performance trends, logs, metrics, and deployment behavior to identify issues quickly and accurately.
• Ability to mentor team members, review automation code, improve test design, promote quality ownership, and collaborate effectively with engineering, DevOps, and product stakeholders.

What do we offer?

At Thales we provide CAREERS and not only jobs. With Thales employing 80,000 employees in 68 countries our mobility policy enables thousands of employees each year to develop their careers at home and abroad, in their existing areas of expertise or by branching out into new fields. Together we believe that embracing flexibility is a smarter way of working. Great journeys start here, apply now!

At Thales, we’re committed to fostering a workplace where respect, trust, collaboration, and passion drive everything we do. Here, you’ll feel empowered to bring your best self, thrive in a supportive culture, and love the work you do. Join us, and be part of a team reimagining technology to create solutions that truly make a difference – for a safer, greener, and more inclusive world.