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About the Role

This role is based at the SAS R&D Center in Pune and is part of the SAS Foundation team. We are seeking a Sr. Associate Analytical Tester to participate in the design, development, and testing of software for our Natural Language Processing (NLP) solutions, in accordance with designated development and testing practices, timelines and quality expectations.

You’ll also develop and maintain automated test suites used by organizations around the world. If you're passionate about software quality and interested in advancing the state of analytics technology, this role might be for you!

In this role, you will work with a collaborative, experienced team to build and maintain industry-leading NLP solutions.

Key Responsibilities

• Gathers requirements from stakeholders (product management, development, testing, management etc.) to determine SAS software performance goals.
• Verifies whether performance of software is meeting goals by experimentation - including experiment design, scripting, prototyping, manual testing, data bulk-up, load generation etc.
• Creates and maintains high quality test automation using modern development techniques and provides key data points to support metrics-based decision making.
• Produces and analyzes metrics that illustrate the quality of applications and develop insight that drives the direction of quality engineering.
• Works with team to promptly triage test failures with precision and accuracy, maintaining the health of the build pipeline.
• Works collaboratively with development, product, operations, and support peers to encourage quality, as a key design element in all work efforts.
• Engages in code reviews for product, test, and infrastructure code.
• Protects users from escaped defects, participate in support escalations, and value Customer Experience (CX) above all.
• Understands the role of deployment, migration, security, and performance in the continuous delivery lifecycle.
• Practices effective techniques for deploying and operating SAS software in a multi-cloud environment.
• Assists the development of NLP models for tasks such as text classification, entity recognition, search, summarization, sentiment analysis, and AI agents.
• Stays up to date with advancements in NLP, LLMs, and AI research, and guide adoption where relevant.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, AI, Data Science, or a related field
• 3-5 years of overall experience, including:
  • At least 1 years of hands-on experience testing software
  • 2+ years of experience in NLP / Machine Learning roles
• Strong interpersonal, written, and verbal communication skills.
• Experience with Agile software development methodologies and practices.
• Strong understanding of software development processes and quality standards.
• Demonstrated ability to consistently deliver high-quality software on schedule.
• Strong attention to detail while maintaining a clear understanding of the broader business context.
• Proven ability to collaborate within and across teams to achieve shared objectives.

• Equivalent combination of related education, training and experience may be considered in place of the above qualifications.

Mandatory Technical Skills

• Strong experience designing and developing Python APIs.
• Experience with PyTest.
• Hands-on experience with transformer-based models (e.g., BERT, GPT, T5, LLaMA)
• Proficiency in Python and common ML/NLP frameworks (e.g., PyTorch, TensorFlow, Hugging Face, spaCy)
• Strong expertise in NLP techniques such as classification, text clustering, sentiment analysis, entity extraction, parsing, machine learning, deep learning, LLM and Agentic AI.
• Background in search, recommender systems, or speech recognition is a plus
• Capability to identify technical gaps and drive continuous improvement.
• Experience researching, evaluating, and testing new technologies.
• Strong analytical skills to evaluate complex information, develop clear recommendations, and present findings effectively.
• Creative problem-solving skills with strong judgment and decision-making ability.

You are welcome here.

At SAS, it’s not about fitting into our culture – it’s about adding to it. We believe our people make the difference. Our inclusive workforce brings together unique talents and inspires teams to create amazing software that reflects the diversity of our users and customers. 

Additional Information:

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