A principal SDET on building same-language automation, contract testing and single-click deployment pipelines.

Arun Kumar traces his path from white-box tester at Ticketmaster to principal SDET at Smartbox, arguing that testers should be highly technical, sit in design sessions and think years ahead about scalability. He champions writing automation in the same language as the application, asking why each test is added as you climb the test pyramid, and pushing checks left so they run on the CI pipeline before deployment. A central theme is contract testing to isolate microservices and eliminate flaky end-to-end dependencies, enabling five-minute production deploys with no manual testing. He also covers tool selection (Cypress, RestSharp, Locust, Lighthouse), Dockerized environments, monitoring-as-code and treating documentation as part of the repo.

**In this episode:**

**Guest:** Arun Kumar — Principal Software Developer in Test, Smartbox  

> “When we say SDET for me, it's not only testing, it's design as well. And you should be part of the design sessions.”

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