Senior QA Engineer - SDET with Federal Experience

PRAVEENA KARTHIKEYAN

Sterling, VA 201-***-**** ************@*****.***

Clearance: Public Trust (Active) Status: U.S Permanent Resident

https://www.linkedin.com/in/praveena-karthikeyan-qa/

PROFESSIONAL SUMMARY

Senior SDET / QA Engineer with over 8 years of total experience, including 3+ years as the lead tester on a mission-critical U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS/HRSA) federal contract. Expert in full-life cycle testing within SAFe Agile and Microsoft Azure environments. Proven ability to deliver zero-critical-defect releases by combining robust Selenium/Playwright automation with meticulous manual testing (Smoke, UAT, Production Shakeouts, Accessibility) and Exploratory. Highly skilled in stakeholder management, JIRA reporting, LOE estimation, and leading quality assurance strategies across complex multi-environment pipelines.

PROFESSIONAL EXPERTISE

Specialized Testing: Functional, Regression, E2E, UAT, System Integration (SIT), Accessibility (508/WCAG 2.1), Security Vulnerability, Exploratory, Smoke, Production Shakeout, Performance Testing

Automation Tools: Selenium, Playwright, Cypress, Cucumber BDD (Gherkin), REST Assured, Postman, JMeter

Cloud / DevOps: Microsoft Azure (App Services, Load Balancer, Key Vault), Azure DevOps (CI/CD Pipelines), Git

Methodologies: Agile, Scrum, Waterfall, SDLC, STLC, Test Driven Development (TDD), Behavior-Driven Development (BDD)

Languages / DB: Python, C#, SQL, JavaScript, JSON/XML

Test/Defect Mgmt.: JIRA, Confluence, Azure Test Plans, HP ALM

Reporting / Monitoring: Splunk, Tableau, LOE Estimation, Traceability Matrix, MS-Excel

Software Tools: MS-Excel, Microsoft Office 365, Eclipse IDE, Wave, AI Co-Pilot

PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE

Test Engineer DMI (HHS/HRSA Prime Contractor) Tysons, VA October 2022 – Present

Project: HRSA Bureau of Primary Health Care (BPHC) Compliance Portal & EHB Systems

Lead comprehensive QA operations for a mission-critical Azure-hosted compliance platform serving 10,000+ federally funded health centers, ensuring continuity and regulatory adherence (FISMA-Low).

Actively participate in all steps of the Software Testing Life Cycle (STLC), including requirements analysis and bug logging, while reviewing project documentation to ensure project requirements are clearly defined and adhering to development standards.

Architected and maintained a hybrid automation framework using Selenium and Test Harness, achieving 85% regression coverage for new feature pages and reducing execution time.

Engineered and maintained a hybrid automation suite utilizing Selenium WebDriver (Java) for legacy EHB modules and Playwright (TypeScript/JavaScript) for modern HRSA Compliance Portal features, increasing cross-browser reliability by 40%.

Optimized element identification using Playwright’s Locators and Selenium’s Page Object Model (POM), ensuring script stability across frequent UI updates to the HRSA Bureau of Primary Health Care (BPHC) portal.

Manage end-to-end Release Closeout activities, including facilitating Production Temporary Access and performing thorough Production Shakeouts for every release and hotfix.

Drive specialized testing efforts, including PaaS Migration Testing and Security Vulnerability testing (Coverity), ensuring zero high-priority findings before production deployment.

Design and execute JMeter performance tests to validate Azure Load Balancer and Blob Storage scaling, verifying capacity for high concurrent user loads and ensuring 99.99% system availability.

Serve as the primary liaison between the technical team and HHS Federal Stakeholders, facilitating UAT sessions, conducting live demos, and achieving 100% on-time UAT sign-off every release cycle.

Write complex SQL queries against Azure SQL Database and Blob Storage to validate backend data integrity and support complex data migration efforts.

Provide accurate LOE estimates for feature testing, create executive JIRA dashboards, and deliver monthly and weekly status reports to leadership and federal clients.

Technical Analyst (Part-Time Contract) LCPS and QTECH January 2020 – October 2022

Gathered and analyzed functional requirements by studying application workflows and collaborating closely with Business Stakeholders, BAs, and QA Leads to ensure complete clarity of business needs and test scope.

Led functional testing in Agile environments for complex web applications by developing testing strategies, test plans, and workflows, and executing SIT, QA, UAT, regression, and functional test scenarios; also coordinated UAT sessions with end users for approval and sign-off.

Developed and executed automation scripts for new features and regression suites; created and maintained Releases and Test Suites in ALM; managed the full defect lifecycle by identifying, reporting, tracking, validating fixes, and sending reminders to ensure timely resolutions across teams.

Authored advanced SQL queries and SQL-based validations to verify data accuracy across multiple database tables and application reports, supporting both manual and automated testing efforts with strong data validation coverage.

Applied appropriate automation technologies using a minimum set of code/scripts to meet QA testing goals for complex web-based applications and database infrastructures.

Delivered daily and weekly status reports, coordinated testing efforts across teams, communicated progress, risks, and blockers, and ensured alignment with project timelines, quality standards, and release goals.

Provided advanced technical mentorship and analytical support to LCPS students in Java programming, Calculus, and Statistics, leveraging foundational logic and quantitative skills directly applicable to automation design and performance data analysis.

QA Analyst PENTASOFT Technologies, India June 2005 – November 2007

This project is related to a loan Delivery web-based application that allows lenders to submit loans. Lenders can import or enter loan and pool data, perform edits to facilitate error-free delivery, transfer loans between commitments or pools, track the status of loan deliveries, generate reports, and export loan and pool data

Performed Black Box and Regression testing for financial services applications based on detailed Functional Requirement Specifications (FRS).

Assisted senior QA engineers in developing test matrices and tracking test coverage against defined requirements.

Logged software defects, provided clear steps for reproduction, and tracked their status through closure using an internal defect tracking system.

Participated in requirements gathering and review sessions to ensure testability of application features.

Participated in requirements gathering and review sessions to ensure the testability of application features and contributed to the initial creation of Test Plan documents.

EDUCATION

Master of Science in Physics (Elective: Computer Science)

Apr 2004, Grade A, Bharathidasan University, India

Bachelor of Science in Physics

Apr 2002, Bharathidasan University, India

Diploma in Computer Applications

Apr 2002 Global Village Institute, India

CERTIFICATIONS

Splunk Core Certified User, Splunk (2024)

JMeter Pro Certification, Blaze Meter (2022)

AWARDS & RECOGNITION

HHS/HRSA FTCA & UDS Cycle Excellence Award (2023): Recognized for outstanding contribution to the successful release of the critical FTCA cycle.

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