Deepak Kumar Basappa

Senior QA Manager with 19+ years at Light & Wonder, promoted four times from Senior QA Engineer to Senior Manager. Leads a 35+ member quality organization across 8+ enterprise products, owning QA strategy, release governance and go/no-go decisions for regulated, GLI-compliant releases. Known for adopting shift-left testing and making releases faster and more reliable through automation, CI/CD quality gates and data validation, and for bringing Generative AI and LLM-based methods into everyday testing.

ISTQB Advanced Certified Tester.

Senior Manager – Software Quality Engineering at Light & Wonder (2024-02 – Present)

• Scaled quality leadership: lead 35+ SDETs, QA Engineers, QA Leads and vendor partners across 8+ enterprise products; own hiring, appraisals, QA budget and vendor management as part of the India Gaming leadership team reporting to a US-based VP.
• Faster releases: improved release timelines by 10% by owning release cadence, risk assessments and go/no-go decisions, and by embedding automated quality gates in CI/CD with DevOps.
• Escaped defects cut ~50%: reduced escaped defects from 25 to 12 per release through post-release verification, hypercare, root cause analysis and preventive actions.
• Quarterly regulated releases: deliver quarterly GLI-compliant releases with requirements-to-evidence traceability, and drive corrective actions on audit findings and submission rejections.
• AI transformation: contributed to the AI transformation of ~40 products, introducing LLM-based test design and GitHub Copilot-assisted automation into the team’s daily workflow.
• Stronger teams: promoted 4 team members in the past year, raised team skill levels by 20% through structured training and mentoring, and built dedicated QA teams for multiple products.

Manager – Software Quality Assurance at Light & Wonder (2018-01 – 2024-01)

• Automation coverage 25% → 45%: led framework selection and architected scalable Ranorex and Selenium frameworks, cutting manual regression effort.
• 30% faster regression: reduced regression execution time through automation enhancements and CI/CD pipeline optimization.
• Data integrity at scale: owned data migration validation for every customer implementation (30–40 rollouts a year), using Python-based reconciliation between source and target systems.
• Shift-left quality: adopted shift-left testing by bringing QA into requirement and acceptance-criteria reviews, catching defects before development; directed release readiness and production sign-offs.

Associate Manager – Software Quality Assurance at Light & Wonder (2013-01 – 2017-12)

• Revenue-generating deliveries: led QA and V&V for Light & Wonder’s Casino Management products (see Key Projects), where on-time, stable releases and customer go-lives contributed to company revenue growth.
• Global rollouts: directed production installations, UAT and post go-live hypercare across 30–40 customer rollouts a year in North America and Asia, including onsite implementation and user training.

Senior QA Engineer / Lead QA Engineer at Light & Wonder (2007-01 – 2012-12)

• Led the full testing lifecycle from planning to release validation, and built automation scripts that reduced manual regression effort.

Bachelor of Engineering (B.E.) – Adichunchanagiri Institute of Technology, Chikmagalur (2000)