QA Engineer job description

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

RESPONSIBILITIES
- Design a boundary and equivalence case set for a complex business rule or multi-field form, keeping the case count small without losing coverage.
- Automate API tests for a service end to end, including authentication, error cases and data setup, without being shown how.
- Automate UI tests for a complex flow, choosing stable locators and waits so the test does not flake under normal timing variation.
- Write your own charter for a small area, time-box the session, and turn what you find into clear bug reports.
- 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.
- Analyze requirements across a feature, working with stakeholders to fill gaps, and turn vague criteria into testable statements.

REQUIREMENTS
- Experience at the Junior QA Engineer level (level 1 of 5) or equivalent
- Holds ISTQB Certified Tester Foundation Level

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 Prioritization — 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 analyze 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.
- Defect Management — You can decide which defects to escalate and when, and track the dependencies they carry across teams.

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.
- Baseline Security Testing — You can test basic authorization 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 and report each difference as a bug or normal platform behavior, with enough detail to reproduce it.

Quality Leadership
- Test Strategy — You can adapt the team's test approach to the risk of a piece of work, with support, and state what the plan does not cover.
- 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 organize a small piece of work into steps, put them in a sensible order, and finish it by the date you agreed, raising problems before they cause a delay.
- Planning & Estimation — You can estimate your own work with reasonable accuracy and keep 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 accountable for it, including the parts nobody enjoys.
- Quality Focus — You can define what good enough means for a project, put checks in place to show it has been met, and hold work back when it falls short.

Craft
- Problem Solving — You can break a large, ambiguous problem into pieces and weigh the options for each against the evidence.
- Domain Expertise — You can work confidently with the tools and methods 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.
- Writing & Documentation — You can write for a defined audience, whether a proposal, a policy, a report, 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 frequency that suits them.

Leadership
- Leadership — You can spot a problem and propose a way forward unprompted, and you take a small leading role such as running a working group.
- Mentoring — You can help someone new settle into 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)