Open to opportunities

Rowan Kendal

Senior QA Automation Engineer · Team Lead

AI is a force multiplier, but you still need an engineer who knows what to multiply. I close the gap between intent, requirements, expectations, and reality before it costs stakeholders anything. I give teams confidence to keep shipping across Web, API, Mobile, Web3 and Blockchain.

LinkedInDownload Resume
0+
Test cases crafted
0+
Merge Requests Reviewed
0+
Automated test cases built
0+
Bugs investigated and reported
Release sign-off improved
0+
Manual hours saved per week
0+
Tasks Created
0K+
Code Lines Added
0
QA Automation Engineers Mentored

Quality Engineering, AI-Augmented

I don't just use AI tools. I build quality systems that are architected to work with them. That means predictable outputs, structured contracts, and guardrails that keep AI-assisted workflows reliable at scale.

AI-Ready Test Architecture

Designed test frameworks with structured outputs and deterministic assertions that AI agents can generate, run, and interpret without manual intervention.

Agent Guardrails & Consistency

Built guardrails that enforce reliability and repeatability for AI-generated test actions, preventing hallucinations from reaching production.

AI-Augmented Workflow

Daily use of Cursor, Claude Code, and LLM tooling to accelerate test authoring, root-cause analysis, and coverage gap detection.

RAG & Local Model Integration

Hands-on experience with LangChain, Chroma (vector store), and Ollama for building context-aware tooling in quality workflows.

Experience

Dcentralab

Current

Web3 / blockchain startup

QA & Automations Team Lead

May 2024 – June 2026

  • Owned the full test strategy: built automation infrastructure from zero using Selenium/Python and GitLab CI/CD
  • Designed test strategies covering high-risk integrations, edge cases, and production behavior across distributed blockchain services
  • Cut release sign-off time from days to hours
  • 300+ new automated test cases shipped; 100+ manual testing hours saved per week
  • Architected a parameterised CI pipeline serving multiple products simultaneously with parallel execution across environments
  • Wired production monitoring to real-time Slack alerting for immediate incident detection and escalation
  • Designed blockchain and Web3 test suites covering wallet flows, smart contract interactions, and on-chain state verification
  • Owned load and performance testing with JMeter and Locust; drove performance baselines across core services
  • Delivered mobile automation (Appium) and integrated accessibility compliance checks into the release pipeline
  • Introduced AI-ready test architecture and implemented guardrails to ensure consistent, auditable AI-assisted workflows
  • Integrated MCP for AI agent orchestration and automated test case management
  • Developed testing strategies for AI-assisted tooling, including output validation and edge-case coverage for LLM-integrated features.
  • Built guardrails and execution standards for agentic test pipelines
  • Hands-on experience transforming a traditional SDLC into an agentic one: integrating AI agents across test case generation, automation scripting, triage, and observability to create a pipeline that largely runs itself
  • Mentored 5 QA engineers, from test fundamentals to advanced automation design
  • Served as the bridge between QA, development, product, marketing, and management: shared test progress, surfaced issues early, and delivered automation services that reduced manual hours across teams
  • Built an AI-powered customer support automation that closes conversations without human intervention, freeing the team to focus on higher-priority work
  • Collaborated with HR to update company protocol and automated OOO and sick day reporting based on employee calendar events
  • Collaborated with Sales to automate user data migration and follow-up flows
  • Implemented developer code contribution monitoring for management oversight on a dynamic dashboard
  • Automated daily bug status reports per team
PythonSeleniumGitLab CI/CDWeb3BlockchainAppiumJMeterLocustMCPAI guardrails

Feature management SaaS · acquired by Zendesk

QA Automation Engineer

Jun 2023 – Feb 2024

  • Inherited a 500+ test suite in full failure. Diagnosed root causes and revived all tests to a consistent pass rate.
  • Wrote 100+ integration and E2E tests from scratch using Cypress and TypeScript
  • Migrated test reporting and case management to Qase.io; wired full pipeline through Azure Pipelines
  • Left the test suite in a significantly healthier state with clear ownership and documented conventions
  • Validated feature flag rollouts and A/B experiments across the full release lifecycle — working directly on the platform that powers these workflows for enterprise teams.
CypressTypeScriptAzure PipelinesQase.io

E-commerce automation platform · acquired by PayPal

QA Automation Engineer

Jan 2022 – May 2023

  • Built Cypress/TypeScript automation infrastructure from zero: first automated test suite at the company
  • Grew coverage to 150+ automated tests across critical e-commerce and integration flows
  • Set up GitHub Actions CI to run tests automatically on every pull request
  • 2,500+ GitHub contributions over 16 months: active participant in engineering, not just QA
CypressTypeScriptGitHub Actions

QA Automation Instructor

ATID · Elevation · Ness-Tech

Instructor

Sep 2021 – Dec 2021

  • Designed and delivered QA automation curriculum to 30+ engineers across three training programmes
  • Covered Selenium, Pytest, and CI/CD basics alongside framework design and real-world best practices
SeleniumPytestCI/CDTrainingCurriculum designMentorship

Bravo Communications

E-commerce operations

Operations Manager

Feb 2018 – Apr 2021

  • Managed multiple e-commerce stores end-to-end
  • Researched and evaluated new potential products
  • Managed and analyzed sales, inventory, revenue, expenses, and performance
  • Automated and optimized business processes
  • Built, maintained, and managed multiple websites using WordPress and Elementor
E-commerceData AnalysisProject ManagementMicrosoft ExcelWordPressProcess Automation
Case Study

The Bug That Would Have Cost Users Money

The feature: cross-chain token transfers between two blockchain networks. The UI worked. Transactions went through. Amounts displayed correctly in the interface.

The bug: the conversion factor for one token pair used the wrong decimal precision. A token with 18 decimals was being handled as though it had 6. The difference per transaction was invisible in the UI and only surfaced when asserting against the exact expected value.

Classic floating-point precision bug. The class that doesn't fail a manual check, only a computed assertion.

How it was caught

Automated integration tests with independently calculated expected values. The test computed the correct post-conversion balance and asserted against what the chain actually held. Manual testing might have missed this. The transaction succeeded, amounts looked right, and the UI was clean. The assertion on the exact number is what caught it.

Impact if it shipped

Every transfer of that token pair would have silently sent users the wrong amount. In a DeFi context, that’s a financial loss on every transaction, with no visible error and no way for users to know until they reconciled against an external source.

What happened

Escalated immediately to the product owner with a documented repro, expected vs. actual values, and the affected scope. Release was held. Fix deployed. Regression test added to the suite.

What it demonstrates

The bugs that cost money are not always the ones that break visibly. Sometimes they pass every manual check and only show up when you assert on the exact number.

QA Automation Showcase

View all on GitHub

Multi-platform automation infrastructure covering Web, API, Mobile, Desktop, and CI/CD, built to be expandable and production-ready.

Notch-Automation-Audit

Playwright + Pytest automation audit for a Notch AI email triage system. Gates G1-G4 covering sender, subject, body, and AI reply. 70 test cases across 14 suites.

Python
QA-Automation-Testing-Showcase

Multi-platform automation showcase using Selenium + TestNG. Covers Web, API, Mobile, Desktop, and Electron apps with Page Object Model and Allure reporting.

Java
2
DCentralLab-Selenium-Python-Demo

Selenium + PyTest + Allure automation framework for DCentralLab crypto products. Page Object Model pattern.

Python
LabOS-Cypress-Demo

Cypress tests for the LabOS web app with backend verifications. TypeScript, Page Object Model.

TypeScript
Vicarius-Selenium-Java-Demo

Testing Vicarius.io with Selenium & TestNG written in Java.

Java
weather-api-cypress-testing-demo

Cypress API and UI tests for WeatherAPI service, including API and UI automation.

TypeScript

How I Work

Pre-Development Involvement

Requirement gap analysis, risk identification, and test scenario mapping before development begins. Catching ambiguity early costs nothing. Catching it in production costs everything.

Parametrized Coverage

One test script runs every variation of a business flow. Change the inputs, cover the edge cases, no duplicate scripts.

Coverage Architecture

Not all test cases are equal. I map suites to risk dimensions - semantic boundaries, gate interactions, encoding edge cases - so coverage gaps are visible before the audit, not after.

AI-Accelerated Scripting

Tests ship same day as features, not days after. AI-assisted generation and MCP integration close the gap between dev and QA. For AI-driven features: testing behavioral boundaries, consistency within tolerance, and failure modes rather than exact output assertions.

Shift-Left by Default

Bugs caught pre-production cost a fraction of what they cost post-release. Zero slipped to production undetected.

Risk-Based Triage

Before blocking a release, I weigh three things: severity when it hits, the real user volume behind the failure rate, and reproducibility. Not every bug blocks. Not every block is obvious. The call is always documented with PM sign-off, so "we decided not to block" and "we didn't know" stay two very different conversations.

“AI writes code faster than traditional QA can keep up. Script-based automation breaks constantly. The teams that win are adopting intelligent, adaptive testing.”

Israel-IT.org, 2026
PlaywrightCypressSeleniumPostmanJestMochaPythonTypeScriptJavaScriptJavaHTML5.NETDockerGitHub ActionsGitLabJenkinsKubernetesAzurek6GrafanaDatadogJMeterGatlingLocustOWASP ZAPSnykSonarQubeCloudflareCursorClaudeOpenAILangChainHuggingFacePyTorchPostgreSQLMongoDBMySQLRedisElasticsearchSQLiteNode.jsGraphQLGoogle CloudReactAWSAngularPlaywrightCypressSeleniumPostmanJestMochaPythonTypeScriptJavaScriptJavaHTML5.NETDockerGitHub ActionsGitLabJenkinsKubernetesAzurek6GrafanaDatadogJMeterGatlingLocustOWASP ZAPSnykSonarQubeCloudflareCursorClaudeOpenAILangChainHuggingFacePyTorchPostgreSQLMongoDBMySQLRedisElasticsearchSQLiteNode.jsGraphQLGoogle CloudReactAWSAngular

Skills

Test Frameworks

6 tools

PlaywrightCypressSeleniumPostmanJestMocha
PostmanJestMocha
PlaywrightCypressSelenium

Languages

6 tools

PythonTypeScriptJavaScriptJavaHTML5.NET
JavaHTML5.NET
PythonTypeScriptJavaScript

CI/CD & Infrastructure

6 tools

DockerGitHub ActionsGitLabJenkinsKubernetesAzure
JenkinsKubernetesAzure
DockerGitHub ActionsGitLab

Performance & Monitoring

6 tools

k6GrafanaDatadogJMeterGatlingLocust
JMeterGatlingLocust
k6GrafanaDatadog

Test Frameworks

PlaywrightCypressSeleniumPostmanJestMocha

End-to-end, integration, and API test coverage. UI automation through to contract testing, with mocking and assertion libraries for every layer.

Security Testing

4 tools

OWASP ZAPSnykSonarQubeCloudflare
Cloudflare
OWASP ZAPSnykSonarQube

AI & ML Tools

6 tools

CursorClaudeOpenAILangChainHuggingFacePyTorch
LangChainHuggingFacePyTorch
CursorClaudeOpenAI

Databases

6 tools

PostgreSQLMongoDBMySQLRedisElasticsearchSQLite
RedisElasticsearchSQLite
PostgreSQLMongoDBMySQL

Cloud & APIs

6 tools

Node.jsGraphQLGoogle CloudReactAWSAngular
ReactAWSAngular
Node.jsGraphQLGoogle Cloud

Test Frameworks

PlaywrightCypressSeleniumPostmanJestMocha

End-to-end, integration, and API test coverage. UI automation through to contract testing, with mocking and assertion libraries for every layer.

Languages

PythonTypeScriptJavaScriptJavaHTML5.NET

Test automation, scripting, and tooling across backend, frontend, and data layers.

CI/CD & Infrastructure

DockerGitHub ActionsGitLabJenkinsKubernetesAzure

Automated test pipelines with parallel execution and containerised runs integrated at every stage of the deployment workflow.

Performance & Monitoring

k6GrafanaDatadogJMeterGatlingLocust

Load testing across throughput, latency, and stability under stress. Production observability with alert pipelines and post-release regression tracking.

Security Testing

OWASP ZAPSnykSonarQubeCloudflare

Permission boundary testing, API auth bypass attempts, vulnerability scanning, and secrets management.

AI & ML Tools

CursorClaudeOpenAILangChainHuggingFacePyTorch

AI tools integrated into QA workflows for test generation, log analysis, and coverage gap analysis. Applied to testing non-deterministic systems.

Databases

PostgreSQLMongoDBMySQLRedisElasticsearchSQLite

Validating integrations across relational, NoSQL, and search data layers.

Cloud & APIs

Node.jsGraphQLGoogle CloudReactAWSAngular

Cross-stack familiarity for REST, GraphQL, and cloud environment validation.

Watch It Run

Pick a suite. See how it moves.

› select a suite above to run tests

What People Say

Rowan is the kind of QA engineer every product team needs but rarely finds. At DcentraLab, his technical depth and attention to detail caught issues before they ever reached production, protecting our users and the business from real consequences. He built test infrastructure that scaled with us, and his AI-augmented workflow only made him faster. I recommend Rowan without hesitation to any team serious about shipping reliable software.

EB

Erez Ben-Kiki

CEO, DcentraLab

Rowan helped me with a few private lessons in Selenium + Python. Knows and understands the material. Many thanks for the help!

MM

Michael Medvedev

QA Engineer · January 2022

Rowan is more than a team lead. He covers every stage of the testing cycle from spec to release, and his attention to detail goes beyond reviewing work. He takes ownership of quality across the whole product. Working with Rowan is straightforward: things get done properly. His expertise and commitment make him an asset to any team that takes QA seriously.

TM

Tomer Maimon

Automation Engineer, DcentraLab

Education

Blockchain Expert

Upcoming
BDCC

Starting June 2026

Professional blockchain certification combining technological and economic knowledge with regulation and taxation. Accredited by Israel's Information Technologies Chamber.

Quality Assurance Test Automation

ATID Automation College

2021

QA MethodologiesBug TrackingSeleniumAppiumElectronTestNGPage Objects Design PatternWeb & Mobile GUI TestingREST-assured API & Desktop TestingConfiguration & Data Driven TestingServer-side & Database TestingCI/CD with Jenkins

2015 – 2017

Game Creation PrinciplesUnityC#VFX3ds MaxUX/UIModelingTextures & UVLightingRigging & Animation

Certificates

LinkedIn Learning · Hover a node for details

Testing & QA
TestFoun
Test
Foundations
Apr 2021
SeleI
Selenium
I
Apr 2021
SeleII
Selenium
II
May 2021
Scrifor
Scripting
for QA
May 2021
CyprE2E
Cypress
E2E
Apr 2023
PostAPI
Postman
API
Apr 2023
Languages
PythI
Python
I
Apr 2021
PythII
Python
II
Apr 2021
Java
JavaScript
Apr 2021
Kotl
Kotlin
Jun 2021
Data & Systems
DataAnal
Data
Analytics
May 2021
SQL
SQL
Jun 2021
Algo
Algorithms
Aug 2021
Web & Frontend
HTML
HTML
Jun 2021
Angu
Angular
May 2021
Management
ProjMgmt
Project
Mgmt
Apr 2021

Scroll horizontally on small screens

Projects

Let's talk

Available for senior QA and automation roles. Particularly interested in teams building on Web3, AI, or high-velocity stacks.

Copied Rowan's email
052-8081628
Copied phone number
LinkedIn