Junior QA Engineer job description

Quality engineering — Junior QA Engineer
Runs scripted and exploratory tests and logs defects under guidance.

RESPONSIBILITIES
- Pick up an unfamiliar area fast enough to be useful in it.
- Review acceptance criteria for a piece of work and flag missing edge cases or ambiguous wording before development starts.
- Triage a defect against the team's agreed process, with a senior tester checking your severity and priority calls.
- Create test data for a simple scenario yourself, and mask or avoid using real customer data while doing it, with some support.
- Stay responsible after you hand work over.
- Choose checks that suit the task in front of you, catch your own mistakes before anyone else sees them, and confirm the result works once people start using it.

REQUIREMENTS
- No earlier level needed: this is the first level of the ladder

REQUIRED SKILLS
Test Analysis
- Exploratory Test Charters — You can run a time-boxed exploratory session against a charter someone else wrote, and note what you tried and what you found.
- Risk-Based Test Prioritization — You can follow a stated test order and explain, when asked, why the riskiest case on the list is being run first.
- Requirements and Acceptance Criteria Analysis — You can review acceptance criteria for a piece of work and flag missing edge cases or ambiguous wording before development starts.
- Boundary and Equivalence Test Design — You can run test cases someone else designed using equivalence classes and boundaries, and explain in your own words why each case is there.
- Defect Management — You can triage a defect against the team's agreed process, with a senior tester checking your severity and priority calls.

Automation
- Automation Framework Design — You can add a test to an existing automation framework following the patterns already there, with a reviewer checking your work.
- API Test Automation — You can run an existing API automated test and read its result, and adjust a request payload for a case someone else designed.
- UI Test Automation — You can run an existing UI automated test and read a failure screenshot or trace to say roughly where it broke.
- Regression Suite Maintenance — You can update a failing regression test once shown which product change broke it, and ask before deleting a test you cannot explain.
- Test Code Review — You can review a small test change and spot a missing assertion or a test that would pass whatever the code did. You raise what you notice and leave the merge call to a more experienced reviewer.

Test Engineering
- CI Test Pipeline Integration — You can trigger an existing pipeline run and open its logs to see why a test job failed.
- Test Data Management — You can create test data for a simple scenario yourself, and mask or avoid using real customer data while doing it, with some support.
- Test Environment Provisioning — You can bring up a test environment from an existing script or runbook and tell whether it came up healthy. You ask for help when a dependent service will not start rather than testing around it.
- Flaky Test Diagnosis — You can tell that a test is flaky rather than genuinely failing, and collect the run history and logs that show it. You report it instead of re-running until it passes.
- Test Reporting and Metrics — You can produce the standard test run report showing what passed, failed and was not run, and ask what a number means before including it.

Specialist Testing
- Load and Performance Test Design — You can run an existing load test script against a target environment and read its summary report.
- Accessibility Conformance Testing — You can run an automated accessibility scan on a page and explain what one of its findings means.
- Baseline Security Testing — You can run a provided security checklist against a feature, such as trying an obviously invalid input, and report what happens.
- API Contract Testing — You can write a contract test against an agreed API schema and run it when the service changes. You ask which fields a consumer actually depends on rather than asserting on the whole payload.
- Cross-Browser and Device Testing — You can run a test pass on the browsers and devices you are handed and record what looked or behaved differently. You capture the version and screen size alongside the defect so it can be reproduced.

Quality Leadership
- Test Strategy — You can follow an existing test plan with support and explain why it exists.
- 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 tool you have used works, and say when a question goes beyond your experience.
- 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 keep your own tasks and deadlines in a current to-do list, and tell your manager as soon as work you own will be late.
- Planning & Estimation — You can estimate how long a task will take once the approach is clear, and you say promptly when the estimate turns out to be wrong.
- Ownership & Accountability — You can stay responsible after you hand work over: you check it did what it was meant to, fix your own mistakes, and give updates before anyone asks.
- Quality Focus — You can choose checks that suit the task in front of you, catch your own mistakes before anyone else sees them, and confirm the result works once people start using it.

Craft
- Problem Solving — You can work out what is wrong in work you did not create, and you fix the underlying cause instead of working around the symptom.
- Domain Expertise — You can apply the basics of your field to the work you are given, and ask an expert when a task goes beyond what you have learned.
- 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 your work so your team can act on it, and play a request back in your own words before you act on it.
- Collaboration — You can work well with people in other roles, share context and credit, and take criticism of your work without defending territory.
- Writing & Documentation — You can document your own work well enough for a colleague to follow it unaided, such as a how-to guide or a handover, and keep it current as things change.
- Stakeholder Management — You can keep your manager and immediate team informed of your progress, and you raise an issue before someone else discovers it.

Leadership
- Leadership — You can act on direction well, seek feedback on how you work, and be open about what you need help with.
- Mentoring — You can share what you have just learned with your peers and help a newer colleague find their way around.
- Strategic Thinking — You can explain why the work you were given matters and who it is for.