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Form of workTitle:
Senior Software QA Engineer
Job Purpose:
We are looking for a Senior QA engineer to promote the quality of our systems. This includes gathering information about how our systems behave and fulfil the needs of our users, so we can make meaningful decisions. Our QA is an advocate for both end user and technical needs.
Our iterative approach means that we want QA contributions to be “shifted left” in the process, helping to flush out requirements and ensure that they’re properly understood. We also embed test automation within the development process and follow Test-Driven Development (TDD) to ensure a vision of quality is shared by the entire team.
While we expect our software engineers to implement test automation as part of their daily work, we also want our QA engineers to augment this and add their own tests, which requires technical skills as well as an ability to deeply understand our domain and help break it down into testable features. Sometimes this includes asking difficult questions to tease out missing requirements.
We see the QA role to be not just testing, but also about coaching colleagues in what to look for when exercising the system. This means that the ability to work effectively with colleagues from other disciplines, especially product and domain experts, is essential. Candidates for this should have 5+ years professional experience as an Agile QA.
Main Duties and Responsibilities:
- Understand, track and report on system quality
- Help break product needs into smaller, deliverable features by focusing on acceptance criteria (shift-left mentality)
- Understand and communicate the bigger picture for system/regression testing by using techniques like risk-based prioritization
- Coach the whole team on QA practices and be an advocate for team wide quality and testability (avoiding silos)
- Assist with User Acceptance Testing (UAT), helping users coordinate their activities to avoid gaps in their testing
- Play a pivotal role in agile and Scrum ceremonies, actively participating in sprint planning, backlog refinement, and retrospectives to ensure efficient project execution is balanced with quality concerns
- Act as a bridge between non-technical stakeholders and technical engineering teams, translating quality requirements into technical acceptance criteria
- Analyse and interpret data to identify trends, patterns, and insights, helping our team make data-driven quality decisions
- Identify areas for process improvement and make recommendations to enhance system quality and overall efficiency
- Promote incremental and iterative agile development and testing to cope with uncertainty and maintain flow
- Participate in system support in appropriate time-zones
- Acquire deep expertise in the domain
- Limited travel for regular team meet-ups
Qualifications and skills:
- 5+ years Test design and planning, including domain analysis techniques
- 5+ years agile/iterative development practice as related to QA
- 5+ years exploratory testing
- 3+ years technical automation using frameworks like Selenium/Playwright etc.
- Basic technical skills, such as scripting, SQL queries, and version control
- Knowledge Application Programming Interfaces (API) and testing via postman or equivalent
- Understanding of release processes including modern deployment pipelines
- Strong time management, organization, execution, written & verbal communication skills
- Strong collaboration skills to effectively work across a diverse group including executives, managers, and subject matter experts (SME)
- Proficiency in agile and Scrum methodologies, with experience using tools such as JIRA and Azure DevOps
- Experience working closely with technical engineering teams, and understanding agile software development lifecycles
- Ability and desire to work in a fast paced, dynamic environment
- Ability to remain calm and focused when prioritizing competing demands
The software team maintains the mission-critical systems that help to make Marken a trusted supply chain partner for medical clinical trials. Our business is global and a critical dependency for our customers, so we strongly emphasise the reliability of our systems and their support.
Our UK teams work remotely but meet monthly in person to coordinate roadmaps and architectural vision . There may be occasional travel to other sites.
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