QA Engineer job description

Quality engineering — QA Engineer
Designs and runs tests for a feature with little day-to-day direction.

REQUIRED SKILLS
Test Analysis
- Exploratory Test Charters — You can write your own charter for a small area, time-box the session, and turn what you find into clear bug reports.
- Risk-Based Test Prioritisation — You can rank the tests for a small piece of work by likely impact with some support, and say which case you would drop first if time ran out.
- Requirements and Acceptance Criteria Analysis — You can analyse requirements across a feature, working with stakeholders to fill gaps, and turn vague criteria into testable statements.
- Boundary and Equivalence Test Design — You can design a boundary and equivalence case set for a complex business rule or multi-field form, keeping the case count small without losing coverage.

Automation
- Automation Framework Design — You can extend a framework with a new helper or fixture that fits its existing conventions, and explain why the convention exists.
- API Test Automation — You can automate API tests for a service end to end, including authentication, error cases and data setup, without being shown how.
- UI Test Automation — You can automate UI tests for a complex flow, choosing stable locators and waits so the test does not flake under normal timing variation.
- Regression Suite Maintenance — You can triage a run of regression failures on your own and tell a real break from a test that has fallen behind the product. You fix the tests in your team's area and flag the ones that need a wider decision.
- Test Code Review — You can review test code against the conventions your team has agreed, catching brittle selectors, fixed waits and assertions that only cover the happy path. You say what you want changed, not just that you dislike it.

Test Engineering
- CI Test Pipeline Integration — You can add a test job to an existing pipeline configuration, with some support, and set it to run on the trigger the team already uses.
- Test Data Management — You can design test data for a complex scenario spanning several entities, keeping it isolated between parallel test runs so tests do not interfere with each other.
- Test Environment Provisioning — You can provision an environment with the configuration and stubbed dependencies a given test run needs, then tear it down cleanly. You notice when an environment has drifted from the configuration it claims.
- Flaky Test Diagnosis — You can find the cause of a common flake — a fixed wait, shared data, test order — and fix it with review. You can say which of two contradictory runs told the truth.
- Test Reporting and Metrics — You can write up a test run for a named audience and pick the few numbers that matter to them. You add the context that stops a raw pass rate being misread.

Specialist Testing
- Load and Performance Test Design — You can design a simple load test with a stated workload and success criteria, run it against a test environment, and report what you measured.
- Accessibility Conformance Testing — You can check an interface with the keyboard alone and a screen reader for the basics, and file a defect that names the standard it breaks.
- Security Testing Fundamentals — You can test basic authorisation rules yourself, such as whether one user can reach another user's data by changing an identifier, with some support.
- API Contract Testing — You can add and maintain contract tests for a service you work on, covering error responses as well as successful ones. You can tell a genuine contract break from a harmless additive change.
- Cross-Browser and Device Testing — You can test a feature across the agreed support matrix, touch and small screens included, and describe a rendering or behaviour difference precisely enough to fix. You know which differences are bugs and which are platform norms.

Quality Leadership
- Release Readiness Assessment — You can gather what a release decision needs — test results, open defects, what went untested — and present it without spin. You say plainly which areas you did not have time to cover.
- Quality Coaching and Enablement — You can show a colleague how a test or a tool works once you have used it yourself. You answer questions about your own tests clearly and say when something sits outside what you know.
- Quality Gate Definition — You can apply the quality gates already defined for a pipeline and say why a build was stopped. You escalate a gate that looks wrong instead of skipping past it.

Delivery
- Project Management — You can break a small piece of work into tasks, sequence them, and run it to a date you agreed, escalating risks before they become slips.
- Planning & Estimation — You can estimate your own tasks with reasonable accuracy and deliver at a steady enough pace that other people can plan around you.
- Ownership & Accountability — You can pick up a problem that has no obvious owner and make yourself the accountable party for it, including the parts nobody enjoys.
- Quality Focus — You can define what good enough means for a project, put the checks in place to prove it, and hold back a release that misses the bar.

Craft
- Problem Solving — You can break a large, ambiguous problem into tractable pieces, weigh the options against evidence, and explain the tradeoff you chose.
- Domain Expertise — You can work confidently across the systems and tools your team uses daily, and you can explain how your work serves the team's goals.
- Continuous Learning — You can pick up an unfamiliar area fast enough to be useful in it, and you turn what you learned into something others can reuse.

Communication
- Communication — You can explain a complex topic to people with very different backgrounds, adjusting the detail to the audience without talking down to them.
- Collaboration — You can build working relationships beyond your own team and get things done through people who do not report to you.
- Technical Writing — You can write for a defined audience, whether a proposal, a runbook, or a decision record, and make the reasoning as clear as the conclusion.
- Stakeholder Management — You can identify who is affected by your work and keep them updated at a level of detail and a cadence that suits them.

Leadership
- Leadership — You can identify a problem and propose a way forward unprompted, and you take a small leading role such as running a working group.
- Mentoring — You can onboard someone onto your team's work, answer their questions patiently, and give feedback specific enough to act on.
- Strategic Thinking — You can connect your team's work to its goals and question a task that does not appear to serve them.

REQUIRED CERTIFICATIONS
- ISTQB Certified Tester Foundation Level (required from QA Engineer)