The team

We are looking to hire a Senior QA Engineer to be a key member of the quality assurance team as we continue to expand globally. It is a really closely knit team with a mission to provide high quality software solutions that will directly contribute to the mission of PrimaryBid i.e. to provide a fair, inclusive and transparent process to the retail investors to the public markets. As we expand globally, we need additional QA staff that will help make sure that PrimaryBid is known as a brand backed by quality.

The role

You will be a well experienced QA with an SDET skillset included. Your primary focus is making sure everything that the engineering team releases to production is of the highest quality. You will be focused on helping the team achieve (as close to) 100% automated test coverage that allows for the lowest release cadence possible. As a senior engineer, you will need to be able to mentor others and bring new ideas across multiple teams and projects. You will be able to take problems and own them with limited help, and reach out to gain knowledge from others on your own accord.

Key responsibilities

• End-to-end test complex API, web and mobile based.
• Create and maintain automated test cases, execute test suites, review and diagnose reported bugs, and ensure overall system quality prior to a release.
• Take a shift-left mentality to enable teams to deliver quality code 100% of the time
• Design, develop, maintain, and troubleshoot automated suites of tests
• Work with the engineering teams to derive requirements and acceptance criteria throughout the development cycle.
• Help to reproduce, debug, and isolate bugs and verify fixes.
• Work closely with other members of the QA team to produce test plans, cases, procedures and reports.
• Work in cross functional areas with other internal engineering teams in a disciplined agile environment.
• Estimate own testing tasks and work productively with minimum supervision.
• Mentor and guide engineers and product managers across the organisation, promoting a culture of learning and continuous improvement.
• Identify and recommend changes or improvements to existing processes to improve quality of software delivered.

Requirements

• Relevant experience writing automation tests, most recently in Cypress or Playwright
• Highly proficient in Typescript
• Experienced in testing user interfaces, APIs and microservices
• You can dig down and query databases as well as working in the frontend
• Have strong analytical and problem-solving skills
• Must be detail oriented, analytical and creative thinker with passion for quality and test automation.
• Have strong collaboration, negotiation and influencing skills.
• Have experience leading ambiguous situations, dealing with technical issues and coming up with effective solutions to ensure project deliverables.
• Have experience with tools such as JIRA, Confluence and Git
• Experience with building quality controls into CI/CD pipelines
• Team player - you see your work as part of the team’s overall plan, and within that you’re happy driving your own projects or supporting team members with theirs
• Have an ownership mentality: don't just execute what's asked of you, but question whether we've asked you the right question or if it could be done a better way

Our Tech Stack

• Infrastructure: AWS, GCP (Data Analytics & ML), Kubernetes, Terraform
• Observability: Splunk, Sentry
• Storage: MongoDB (Atlas), MySQL (RDS)
• Backend, Frontend: TypeScript, NextJS, React, GraphQL, NATS JetStream
• Data: BigQuery, Cloud Composer, FiveTran, DBT, Looker
• QA: Cypress, Testmo, Playwright
• CICD: Gitlab

Desirables

• Experience with financial markets
• 10+ years working within a QA function
• Have worked in a continuous delivery environment

A day in the life of a Staff QA Engineer

My day is usually a pretty mixed bag of affairs, I participate in my team’s daily standup which involves discussing work that needs to be done, blockers around getting said work complete, organising application releases (involving product manager, DevOps and the Tech Lead of the team if needed). I also spend time speaking with various colleagues around tickets that are being worked on to get an understanding of testing that needs to be carried out and discussions around automating the end to end testing process of the work in the ticket. On various days, I put together tickets and information around a release for the application and communicate with various stakeholders and business users to provide information on what the release will contain and what is needed for feature X to work. From time to time, I also orchestrate mass testing efforts for bigger aspects of the application under test.

The company culture here is a magnet that pulls me out of bed every morning. Everyone has a common goal and is willing to help and advise where needed. Testing is seen as a key part of releases and the entire team helps facilitate this and asks relevant questions around testing, automation and releases processes from a QA point of view allowing me to be a subject matter expert in my field. Regardless of a hybrid working, everyone always seems engaged and friendly with plenty of non-work related talk and people chatting about personal experiences and providing an overall human touch both in person or over a google meet.

Interview Process

Initial Interview - Once you’ve been shortlisted, we will invited you for a technical interview with the hiring manager. This interview is as much an opportunity for you to understand more about the role and the plans for the business as much as us digging deeper into your experience.

Technical Interview - If you are successful at the initial interview stage, we invite you to our technical interview where some of our existing QA team will ask you to demonstrate your abilities as a QA and hands on coder.

Final Interview - If all goes well at the technical interview, we invite you to meet some of our senior staff from other departments that you could be working alongside, so please come prepared with lots of interesting questions!