Senior Software QA Engineer, Platform

Posit is seeking a QA engineer with strong automation and environment provisioning skills to join our Platform Team. The team works across all Posit products, developing shared components and enabling customers to use the products better. This is a high-leverage team that can impact many people and customers.

You’ll be working on a small team that is currently focused on building a new metrics aggregation product called Chronicle, written using Go and OpenTelemetry, to help customers and internal teams better understand how our products work. The team has also spent time working on AWS licensing, and in the future will expand further, which may include more licensing or other platform needs.

This role offers a great opportunity to drive the quality of our software through careful testing and thoughtful analysis. If you are an optimizer who is passionate about improving existing systems, learning new technology, and working with amazing people, this job could be for you.

What you’ll own:

• Define test strategies and Definition of Done for projects. The Platform team handles many distinct projects and needs a champion of quality for each one. You will determine what needs to be tested and automated, define regression and validation requirements, solicit feedback from stakeholders, and document the test processes for the rest of the team.
• Participate in the entire lifecycle of the projects from grooming through support. The Platform team works together to ensure we deliver and maintain high-quality software.

• Create, maintain, and enhance automated test infrastructure, making automated tests easier to author, faster to run, more resilient, and broader in coverage. Depending on the project, these automated tests could be end-to-end, API, or load and performance. It is critical for the team to have automated tests and a long-term automation strategy, and we would love to hear from you how best to accomplish that.
• Develop infrastructure as code to deploy reproducible test environments in AWS, Kubernetes, docker, etc.
• Domain expertise, over time. QA engineers work heavily with other teams and often act as a connective “glue” between teams. To be effective, you will need to learn from these other teams. This will include learning about the Posit products and what is most needed for the projects we support.
• User advocacy for new features and enhancements to products and projects

What you’ll help with:

• Collaborate with the developers and other stakeholders to make sure we are building the right things, and building things right
• Collaborate with other QA Engineers to coordinate test coverage, assess risk holistically, and mentor others in areas where you have expertise (as they will for you)
• Plan for the future of automated tests and infrastructure

What you’ll teach:

• Test automation best practices, helping to create repeatable and maintainable automation patterns for others to follow easily
• A quality mindset across the team. Everyone on the team owns quality, but QA should help set the tone of user advocacy
• Industry trends and new technologies related to testing and automation

What you’ll learn:

• An appreciation for data science workflows
• A deeper understanding of cloud infrastructure and DevOps for build / test / deployment
• New skills related to data science patterns and best practices

You have:

• The desire to help other teams, and work with them daily in a highly collaborative environment
• Must have experience provisioning Linux test servers; familiarity with Linux tools and environments
• Must have experience with, or willingness to learn and write, infrastructure as code (Pulumi, Terraform, Cloudformation, or similar) 
• Experience with a major cloud provider (AWS, Azure, or GCP)
• Must have experience writing automated tests, in any language 
• Experience creating high-level test strategies for multiple products

• Curiosity and a willingness to learn new technologies
• A humble, collaborative approach to producing high-quality software
• 5+ years of professional experience in software Quality Assurance or Software Engineering

Within one month, you will…

• Get to know everyone on the product team and become familiar with our current. software development practices.
• Work through our onboarding guide and get familiar with our project.
• Create test plan for the product features
• Verify and validate test cases for the product. 
• You should be comfortable testing the product manually.

Within three months, you will…

• Participate in feature planning and provide feedback.
• Feel comfortable navigating the codebase and understand how things fit together.
• Work with the team to ensure test automation architecture supports your team's needs.
• Establish a mentor relationship with your teammates 
• Own your team’s release coordination
• You should be comfortable adding test automation to available frameworks.

Within twelve months, you will…

• Own QA for features and drive their testing and automation.
• Share your expertise and insights with team members, contributing to the collective knowledge and skill set of the engineering team.
• Point to parts of the products that you have significantly contributed to.