Twenty years of finding what breaks
I’m Shaik Khaleelur Rahaman, the engineer behind Qaira. I’ve spent my career making large systems reliable: as a Principal Engineer at Yahoo on platforms serving 500M+ users, and for over twelve years at SAP Ariba, where I led a team of 17 QA engineers and brought LLMs into enterprise test automation and CI/CD.
Now I build and evaluate AI systems full time. AI is reaching production faster than most teams can verify it, and quality engineering is how you close that gap.
How I think about AI quality
The goal isn’t just to test AI. It’s to make AI quality measurable, accountable and sustainable. I call this the AI Quality Operating Model.
Strategy
Risk-based tiers, so the riskiest AI features get the most scrutiny.
Standards
A measurable definition of “correct,” with thresholds agreed before launch.
Systems
Automated evaluations on every model, prompt, retrieval, tool or code change, plus monitoring in production.
Ownership
A named accountable owner, clear decision rights and audit trails. Autonomy grows only as fast as accountability.
Career
B.E. in Electronics and Communication Engineering, Dr. Ambedkar Institute of Technology (Bangalore University).
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2025 – now
AI Engineer, independent (Qaira)
Designing, building and deploying agentic AI, RAG and LLM evaluation applications end to end.
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2021 – 2025
SAP Ariba, Quality Expert (Lead SDET and Scrum Lead)
Built AI-enabled automation integrating Jira, LLMs and Playwright: ~60% less test authoring time, ~80% less regression effort, 35–40% faster release cycles, and ~30–40% better automation speed, accuracy and coverage. Led a team of 17 QA engineers.
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2013 – 2021
SAP Ariba, Sr. SDET and Sr. Consultant Engineer in Test
Cut regression execution time by 50% with API automation in Katalon Studio, ran performance testing with JMeter, and re-architected a suite of 4,500+ daily tests into modular components.
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2004 – 2012
Yahoo, Principal Engineer, QE
Reduced manual regression effort by ~80% with WebDriver automation frameworks for consumer platforms serving 500M+ users.
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2002 – 2013
FICO, iSoftTech, Dell
Software engineering, automation and enterprise application testing.
Writing
The AI Quality Operating Model for Engineering Leaders
Why most AI quality problems are ownership problems, and the four things that fix them.
Read on LinkedIn
The Future of Quality Engineering in the AI Era
How quality engineering is evolving, and a practical roadmap for QA engineers and leaders.
Read on LinkedIn