Senior QA Engineer job description

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

RESPONSIBILITIES
- 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.
- Chase flakes rooted in the product or the infrastructure rather than the test, including races that only appear under load.
- Define the gates for your team's pipeline, choosing what runs at which stage and what the pass criteria are.
- 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.
- Prioritize testing across a feature from a risk assessment you built yourself, and defend a decision to under-test a low-risk area.
- Teach the technique to others, review their case sets for gaps, and combine it with other techniques where equivalence classes alone miss real risk.

REQUIREMENTS
- Experience at the QA Engineer level (level 2 of 5) or equivalent
- Holds ISTQB Certified Tester Foundation Level and ISTQB Certified Tester Advanced Level - Test Analyst

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 Prioritization — You can prioritize 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 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 teach the technique to others, review their case sets for gaps, and combine it with other techniques where equivalence classes alone miss real risk.
- 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 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 parallelization 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.
- Baseline Security Testing — 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
- Test Strategy — You can develop a test approach with your team and put in place measures that show whether it is working.
- Release Readiness Assessment — You can summarize 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 coordinate a small team's work on a shared goal: who does what by when, what has to wait for what, and a revised plan when things change.
- Planning & Estimation — You can estimate a whole project including its risks and unknowns, split it into stages, and defend the estimate when it is challenged.
- Ownership & Accountability — You can hold accountability for outcomes delivered mostly by other people, taking the blame when it fails and passing on the credit when it works.
- Quality Focus — You can set how quality is checked on complex work shared by several teams, and you spot the problems that only appear where their pieces meet.

Craft
- Problem Solving — You can make the call on a problem outside your expertise and explain its cost, time and risk.
- Domain Expertise — You can advise the team on your area and apply new developments in the field where they pay 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 agreement on the facts and the next steps, and help colleagues frame 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.
- Writing & Documentation — You can own the documents behind a large piece of work, coordinating contributions so that people who were not involved can carry it on.
- Stakeholder Management — You can win support for a proposal, reset expectations when the plan changes, and turn down a request with a reason the other side accepts.

Leadership
- Leadership — You can lead one piece of work shared by several people, on your own team and beyond, and make calls that they act on.
- 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)