Software Engineer · Full-Stack & Automation

Satish Chilkaka

Nine years building software — full-stack apps, automation frameworks, and CI/CD systems across medical, fintech, automotive, and travel platforms. Now building full-stack products with Python & React and LLM-powered tooling.

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Toronto, ON · Open to remote & hybrid

About

I build software end to end — full-stack apps with Python/Django and React, automation frameworks, internal tooling, and CI/CD systems. I'm comfortable in the application codebase, designing systems, writing the code, and wiring up the pipelines that ship it.

My background spans regulated environments (medical devices) and fast-moving product teams, with a consistent focus on clean, maintainable code, measurable outcomes, and reliable delivery. I'm currently building LLM-powered applications and evaluation tooling.

Experience

May 2023 — Present Current

Senior Software Engineer in Test (SDET)

NeuroFlex

  • Designed and built a dual-stack automation framework (TypeScript/Cypress, Python/Playwright), maintained as production software, for brain-health medical-device apps.
  • Wrote unit and integration code in Python and JavaScript (Jest, Playwright) inside the application codebase, working alongside the development team.
  • Built CI/CD quality gates in Bitbucket Pipelines & Jenkins with per-PR execution and merge-blocking on failure.
  • Stood up Grafana, Prometheus, and SonarCloud for application health and code-quality monitoring.
Jan 2021 — Aug 2023

Lead Software Engineer in Test (SDET)

Sherpa

  • Architected the team's first BDD automation framework in JavaScript/TypeScript (Cypress, Playwright).
  • Built REST API coverage across 80+ endpoints (auth, payments, submission) with Postman, Cypress, and Axios.
  • Embedded suites into GitHub Actions & Jenkins; mentored engineers and set code-review standards.
  • Partnered with product and engineering on requirement reviews, pair programming, and design reviews.
Jul 2016 — Jan 2021

Software Engineer in Test (SDET)

AutoServe1

  • Introduced Node.js & Cypress automation for previously manual workflows (~25% coverage lift).
  • Ran load and stress testing with JMeter & BlazeMeter, surfacing scaling thresholds that informed infrastructure decisions.
  • Owned planning across functional, API, regression, UAT, and performance for Agile deliverables.
Earlier roles

QA Analyst — District 3 (Concordia), Montreal (Jun 2015 — Jun 2016, contract, hybrid): manual & API testing; defects tracked in JIRA.

QA Tester — H-Line Soft Information Technology Pvt. Ltd, Hyderabad (Dec 2011 — Jul 2013): manual & automated testing; HP Quality Center.

Projects

Spendly

Full-Stack Web App

A full-stack personal finance application — a Django REST API backend and a React single-page frontend covering data modeling, authentication, and CRUD workflows end to end.

PythonDjangoReactJavaScriptRESTSQL
GitHub → Live Demo →

AI QA Agent In progress

LLM + Browser Automation

An autonomous agent that explores a web app, generates and runs tests via Playwright, and reports defects — with an evaluation harness that measures how many real bugs it catches. Built to run on local (Ollama) or cloud models.

PythonPlaywrightLLMAgentsEvaluation

Technical skills

Languages & frameworks

PythonDjangoReactJavaScriptTypeScriptNode.jsSQL

Automation & testing

PlaywrightCypressSeleniumJestPostmanREST Assured

Cloud, CI/CD & data

AWSAzureGCPDockerJenkinsGitHub ActionsBitbucket Pipelines FirestoreMongoDBSQL ServerMySQLOracle

Practices & tools

AgileScrumBDDTDDDevOps JiraConfluenceGitHubBitbucket

Outside of my day job

Websites & web apps for small businesses

I design and build fast, modern sites and small web apps for local businesses — clean code, mobile-first layouts, and easy updates. If you need a presence that matches the quality of your work, I'd love to hear from you.

Discuss a project

Education & publications

Education

  • M.Eng., Computer Software Engineering Concordia University — 2013–2015
  • Bachelor's degree, Computer Science Jawaharlal Nehru Technological University — 2007–2011

Publications

Community & building with AI

Engineering community

I share practical engineering and testing ideas, encourage quality ownership, and help teams improve reliability through better tooling and coverage.

If you're building a developer community or running discussions on automation, APIs, or AI tooling, I'm happy to collaborate.

Building with AI

I'm currently building LLM-powered tools — agents and evaluation harnesses that bring engineering rigor to non-deterministic systems.

  • Web-testing agents that explore apps and generate tests
  • RAG systems with retrieval-quality evaluation
  • LLM-as-judge pipelines with calibration against human labels

Let's connect

Hiring managers and teams: I'm interested in software engineering roles — full-stack, backend, or SDET — where building well matters.

Email satishchilkaka8@gmail.com Phone +1 (514) 451-4662 LinkedIn linkedin.com/in/satishchilkaka GitHub github.com/Satishchilkaka

© Satish Chilkaka.