Senior QA Engineer job description

Quality engineering — Senior QA Engineer
Owns test strategy for a service and automates its critical paths.

REQUIRED SKILLS
Test Analysis
- Exploratory Test Charters — You can charter and run exploratory sessions across an unfamiliar feature, adapting your mission as you learn, and separate a real defect from a misunderstanding of intent.
- Risk-Based Test Prioritisation — You can prioritise testing across a feature from a risk assessment you built yourself, and defend a decision to under-test a low-risk area.
- 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 teach the technique to others, review their case sets for gaps, and combine it with other techniques where equivalence classes alone miss real risk.

Automation
- Automation Framework Design — You can set the automation framework standards a team builds on, evolve a framework without breaking the suite that depends on it, and judge when a framework should be replaced rather than patched.
- API Test Automation — You can set the API automation approach for a product, including how tests handle test data, environments and flaky dependencies, and coach others in it.
- UI Test Automation — You can set the UI automation approach for a product, including where UI automation is the right layer versus API or unit level, and coach others in writing stable tests.
- Regression Suite Maintenance — You can keep a regression suite trustworthy across a release: retiring tests that no longer earn their run time, re-scoping the ones that have drifted, and saying what each remaining test still protects.
- Test Code Review — You can review test code you did not write and judge whether it will still be readable and diagnosable when it fails in six months. You block a merge over a weak test and name the coverage gap you found.

Test Engineering
- CI Test Pipeline Integration — You can configure a pipeline's test stages from scratch, including parallelisation and caching, so feedback comes back in a reasonable time.
- 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 build and maintain the environments your team's test runs need, seeded data and dependent services included, without a runbook. You keep them reproducible, so a failure is the product's fault and not the environment's.
- Flaky Test Diagnosis — You can chase flakes rooted in the product or the infrastructure rather than the test, including races that only appear under load. You hand teams the pattern behind a class of flakes, not just the single fix.
- Test Reporting and Metrics — You can decide what to report on a piece of work and defend the metrics you left out. You turn a set of results into a statement about risk that a product owner can act on.

Specialist Testing
- Load and Performance Test Design — You can plan and run load, soak and stress tests for a service, and identify the limiting resource from the evidence rather than guessing.
- Accessibility Conformance Testing — You can audit a whole feature against a named accessibility standard using assistive technology and manual technique, and judge which automated-scan findings are noise.
- Security Testing Fundamentals — You can apply common security testing technique, such as input fuzzing and session handling checks, across a feature without being told which checks to run.
- API Contract Testing — You can set up contract testing between a service and its consumers so a breaking change fails before it reaches an end-to-end environment. You decide what belongs in the contract and what does not.
- Cross-Browser and Device Testing — You can choose the browser and device coverage a feature needs, weighing real usage against test cost, and run it without direction. You reproduce a device-only defect that a developer could not.

Quality Leadership
- Release Readiness Assessment — You can summarise the risk in a release for your own area and recommend a call that someone else makes. You separate the defects that must block from the ones that can ship with a note.
- Quality Coaching and Enablement — You can pair with a developer on writing a test and explain why a case is worth covering. You teach the technique as you were taught it rather than improvising your own.
- Quality Gate Definition — You can define the gates for your team's pipeline, choosing what runs at which stage and what the pass criteria are. You keep them strict enough to catch real problems and fast enough that people do not route around them.

Delivery
- Project Management — You can run a multi-person project end to end: you set the scope, track the dependencies between the people involved, and re-plan when reality moves.
- Planning & Estimation — You can estimate a whole project including its risks and unknowns, split it into milestones, and hold the estimate up under challenge.
- Ownership & Accountability — You can hold accountability for outcomes delivered mostly by other people, absorbing the blame when it fails and passing on the credit when it works.
- Quality Focus — You can design the quality practice for complex work owned by several teams, and you anticipate the failure modes that only appear once systems interact.

Craft
- Problem Solving — You can solve problems in domains where you are not the expert, and your solutions hold up on cost, performance, and maintainability at once.
- Domain Expertise — You can be the person the team consults on your area, and you follow where the field is moving and apply it where it pays off.
- Continuous Learning — You can judge which new ideas are worth the team's time and which are not, and you make room for the people around you to learn too.

Communication
- Communication — You can bring disagreeing groups to a shared understanding, and colleagues come to you for help framing a difficult or sensitive message.
- Collaboration — You can align teams with competing priorities on a common goal, surfacing the conflict early instead of letting it harden into resentment.
- Technical Writing — You can own the documentation of a large project, coordinating contributions so the work can be maintained by people who never built it.
- Stakeholder Management — You can win support for a proposal, reset expectations when the plan changes, and refuse a request with a reason the other side accepts.

Leadership
- Leadership — You can take charge of work with no clear owner, motivate people who do not report to you, and make calls others are willing to follow.
- Mentoring — You can mentor someone over months, tell them the uncomfortable thing they need to hear, and adapt how you teach to how they learn.
- Strategic Thinking — You can look a year ahead in your area, name what will matter by then, and turn that into work people can pick up now.

REQUIRED CERTIFICATIONS
- ISTQB Certified Tester Foundation Level (required from QA Engineer)
- ISTQB Certified Tester Advanced Level - Test Analyst (required from Senior QA Engineer)