Principal QA Engineer

Job Description

We are hiring a Principal QA Engineer to join our e-commerce development team and lead from a quality perspective on several key services, including our new checkout which is used across our mobile app and website. This is a chance to innovate and experiment at scale, help build services that millions of customers will use and work in an inclusive product team that aligns with our web business and their goals. The ideal candidate would have experience enabling multi-disciplinary teams to build and deploy solutions that offer real business value, able to coach on better practices based on continuous improvement and working to deliver as a team. We have been going through a digital transformation, changing how we deliver value to our business. A big part of this change is fostering a culture of being open and honest, collaborating, having fun, enabling psychological safety and by creating a place for teams to do their best work.The Team The e-commerce team has just delivered a new front-end checkout using React, hosted in Azure with a build and deployment process using Azure DevOps so they can safely release work, and theyre now in the process of refactoring the existing PHP back end into a shape thats fit for the future. The team is made up of a delivery manager, a product owner, software engineers, DevOps, and a QA engineer. We like to keep our teams small enough that they become a unit of delivery, but large enough that people can pair and mob on tasks and knowledge can be shared out. As a team we also swarm on issues with the wider department if required using the equivalent of an Andon cord so people are alerted to, and team up on fixes together. At every point, you will have the support of your team and the business to do the right thing with autonomy, mastery, and purpose. Above everything else, you will have the opportunity to influence our decisions, help define standards across the teams and contribute to a healthy and happy working environment. About You Within your current organisation, you are a test lead, you support those around you, you are constantly learning and work in a kind, considerate and collaborative manner with a keen interest in new ways of working. You arent afraid to challenge the norm in order to increase the cadence of releasing quality, resilient and secure code into production. You focus on business value by removing repetition in the development process as an advocate for DRY principles in testing. We are looking for someone with lots of experience in their domain, capable of having a real influence within the team by asking the questions that help uncover gaps, identify assumptions that need validating and make sure testing isnt seen as an afterthought, and instead that it should be part of everyones role. A big part of your role will be to help coach the team to ‘shift left, so that they focus on quality, support the adoption of automation and deliver to an agreed definition of done. You will understand how to plan and execute different types of testing depending on the situation at hand, from exploratory to regression you should be keen to create testing strategies that encompass every stage of the software development lifecycle.You see the value in engaging with stakeholders and the wider teams at Footasylum in order to make sure we build the right thing at the right time. Making your work open and supporting your colleagues career progression are things you really value, as we try and create meaningful change at Footasylum based on working together. You will need to be comfortable with both automated and manual testing approaches, making sure we fail fast and adapt. We are looking for someone who can create safety around our APIs as well as our front-end, enabling us to release value early and often through robust testing and constantly improving our standards. We are offering up to £50,000 for the right person, which we assess based on your own experiences, technical skills and against the principles of our department and our ways of working.Recruitment Process We review applications on an individual basis, and if we feel you would be a good fit well invite you to meet with a few members of the Footasylum team for an informal chat about the role, and to see if were a good fit for you. You will hear from us the same day on whether we would like to bring you back to work with the team for a couple of hours, pairing up with a developer on the team youd join. With the COVID-19 situation our teams are all working remotely, adjusting to this new way of working as best we can -and as such well help make the interview process is as clear and stress-free as possible, giving you the same opportunity as if we were meeting face to face. Were not fans of coding challenges or whiteboard interviews, we value open and honest conversations and collaboration instead, giving you a chance to learn about what were doing in an informal, friendly environment, and to see the code youd be working on and the team youd work with.