AI / GenAI Quality Engineering

Bangalore, India

Akshay Dharwad

AI Quality Engineering Manager

GenAI Evaluation & Responsible AI

I build the evaluation practice that makes GenAI products trustworthy — hallucination detection, groundedness audits, RAG and prompt validation, and AI safety guardrails.

View AI work Get in touch
  • 20+ yrs Enterprise quality engineering
  • 30% Faster test cycles
  • 65% Automation coverage (up to)
  • 85% Response-time improvement

01 / Profile

Summary

Quality engineering leader with 20+ years in enterprise software quality who has moved decisively into AI and GenAI quality engineering — building AI-powered QA accelerators, LLM evaluation practices, hallucination detection and groundedness audits, RAG and prompt validation, AI safety and guardrail testing, and PII validation.

The 20+ years of enterprise delivery is the foundation; AI/GenAI evaluation and trustworthy-AI assurance are the current specialisation.

Focused on AI evaluation strategy, audit-ready traceability for regulated stakeholders, AI-assisted test generation, and leading and mentoring engineering teams.

02 / Expertise

AI / GenAI Expertise

01

GenAI Evaluation & Assurance

LLM workflow validation, model behaviour and output evaluation, hallucination detection, groundedness and traceability audits against source requirements, prompt engineering validation, regression evaluation of model changes.

02

RAG & Data Quality for AI

RAG pipeline validation, retrieval relevance checks, PII detection and validation across model inputs/outputs, multi-modal AI testing.

03

AI Safety & Responsible AI

AI safety and guardrail validation, unsupported-content detection, audit-ready evidence and traceability for regulated stakeholders.

04

AI Platforms

  • AWS Bedrock
  • Azure OpenAI
  • Google Vertex AI
  • Anthropic Claude
  • LangChain
  • OpenAI APIs
  • Cursor
  • Claude Code
05

AI-Assisted Quality Engineering

AI-assisted test case and Gherkin generation, automated code review, failure/root-cause analysis, QA productivity tooling.

03 / Portfolio

AI Quality Engineering Portfolio

AI-Powered Test Design

TestCraft — AI-Powered Test Design Accelerator

days of manual test design 10–15 seconds

Python CLI/library that turns a single user story with acceptance criteria (YAML, JSON or plain text) into a complete QA deliverables bundle in about 10–15 seconds:

  • Acceptance-criteria-specific test cases
  • Gherkin feature files
  • A test plan
  • A requirements traceability matrix (RTM)

Uses OpenAI models rather than generic templates, and includes a built-in anti-hallucination and traceability audit that validates every generated artifact against the source requirements and flags unsupported or fabricated content.

Also auto-tags scenarios as Positive, Negative, Regression and Smoke.

AI-Assisted Automation

AI-Enabled Test Automation Framework

Playwright + Python

AI-assisted engineering of Gherkin scenarios, step definitions and Page Object Model components from requirements; automatic scenario tagging for intelligent suite organisation and targeted execution.

AI-Assisted API Testing

AI-Enabled API Testing Framework

REST Assured

Reusable AI-assisted API automation assets for structured scenario generation, validation and execution of REST services.

04 / Experience

Experience

  1. May 2020 – Present

    Quality Assurance Manager

    JRD Systems Bangalore, India

    Client: Gordon Food Service and Information Handling Systems (IHS)

    • Established and drove AI/GenAI quality engineering practices covering LLM workflow validation, prompt and model-behaviour evaluation, hallucination detection, RAG validation, and AI safety/guardrail and PII validation.
    • Built and governed AI-enabled QA accelerators — TestCraft for AI-powered test design and traceability, Playwright + Python AI-assisted UI automation, and REST Assured AI-assisted API testing.
    • Own end-to-end QA strategy across functional, automation, API, integration, performance, regression and UAT for enterprise programs, and lead and mentor QA engineers across functional, automation, performance and security testing.
    • Designed scalable automation frameworks using Selenium, Cucumber and Playwright, cutting test cycle time by 30% and reaching up to 65% automation coverage.
    • Optimised CI/CD quality gates with Jenkins and GitLab CI, standardised API testing with Postman for REST services, and used JMeter for performance optimisation delivering an 85% response-time improvement; established defect management and root-cause practices with JIRA/Confluence.
  2. Aug 2018 – May 2020

    Senior Lead, Quality Analyst

    JRD Systems Bangalore, India

    Client: IHS

    • Owned test planning and coverage/risk review for the Unity Project; deployed Unity applications across AWS QA/UAT/Production and ran ETL/database scripts.
    • Automated regression with Cucumber and Java, and validated REST APIs (GET/POST) with Postman.
    • Ran JMeter benchmarking and response-time validation, and monitored AWS CloudWatch logs for root-cause analysis.
  3. Aug 2016 – Jul 2018

    Lead, Quality Analyst

    JRD Systems Bangalore, India

    Client: Gordon Food Service

    • Built automation frameworks for Recipe Manager and Inventory Manager with JUnit, Selenium WebDriver and Cucumber.
    • Reduced regression execution from 4 days to 6 hours using Jenkins and Sauce Labs cross-browser execution.
    • Wrote JMeter performance scripts and SQL validation queries; handled manual test design, JIRA defect management and Agile ceremonies.
  4. Dec 2006 – May 2015

    QA Lead

    Sabre Bangalore, India

    Client: Travelocity and Lastminute.com

    • Led QA delivery for enterprise travel applications across Travelocity and Lastminute.com.
    • Owned test case design, execution, defect management and release support across the engagement.
  5. May 2015 – Jul 2016

    Entrepreneur

    Bangalore, India

    • Managed business ownership responsibilities during a professional transition, strengthening stakeholder management and execution.
  6. Aug 2005 – Dec 2006

    QC Analyst

    Misys Health Care Systems Pvt. Ltd. Bangalore, India

    • Designed and executed test cases in a 9-member team.
  7. Mar 2005 – Aug 2005

    Software Engineer, QA

    Blue Star Infotech Bangalore, India

    • Designed and executed test cases in a 4-member QA team.

05 / Skills

Technical Skills

Automation & Languages

  • Selenium WebDriver
  • Cucumber
  • WebDriverIO
  • Playwright
  • Playwright Python
  • Java
  • JavaScript
  • TypeScript
  • Python
  • TestNG
  • JUnit
  • Jest
  • Maven
  • Gherkin
  • Page Object Model
  • REST Assured
  • TestCraft

API & Performance

  • Postman
  • REST/SOAP services
  • JMeter
  • LoadRunner

Cloud & CI/CD

  • AWS
  • AWS CloudWatch
  • Jenkins
  • GitLab CI
  • Shell scripting

Test Management

  • JIRA
  • Confluence
  • Bugzilla
  • HP ALM
  • UAT
  • Risk-based testing

AI Platforms

  • AWS Bedrock
  • Azure OpenAI
  • Google Vertex AI
  • Anthropic Claude
  • LangChain
  • OpenAI APIs

06 / Education

Education & Certifications

B.E. (Computer Science)

SDM College of Engineering and Technology, Karnataka University, Dharwad

PMP

Project Management Institute (course completed, 35 PDUs)

Certified ScrumMaster (CSM)

Scrum Alliance

07 / Contact

Let's talk about AI quality.

Open to conversations about GenAI evaluation, responsible AI, and quality engineering leadership.