Senior QA Engineer

Global Market for QA

Markets are changing rapidly, and there is a demand for quick software releases. Agile development has become mainstream; on a global scale, 92% of developer teams adopt agile development, 71% of which aim to release at least once a week. With such a rapid cycle, manual verification is too time-consuming, and there is an urgent need for automation. Our services can solve these critical challenges and make our clients a competitive advantage in software development. QA’s global budget is said to reach over $1 trillion. We are rapidly expanding our service reach internationally to win this vast global market.

About Us

Autify, Inc. is a San Francisco-based startup that was founded by the first Japanese team to graduate from Alchemist Accelerator, one of the top accelerators in the US. With the mission to empower people’s creativity through technology, we have been offering an AI-powered automation platform aiming to eliminate the test phase.

Since 2019, we’ve been providing our AI-powered nocode test automation product and have grown the team to 100+. Our next move is to double down on GenAI. As we have been investing in AI and helping customers’ software quality since 2019, we know how to best utilize GenAI in software QA. With that, we have recently launched our new product, Zenes, a GenAI agent for software quality assurance. 

About This Role

Job Purpose

Since its official launch in October 2019, over 300 companies have implemented Autify for Web, a test automation platform for web applications. The product is steadily growing, and we have provided basic functions expected in a test automation platform. However, we are receiving many requests for additional features and improvements from our clients. We also launched the beta-version of Autify for Mobile, a test automation platform for mobile apps, in April 2021, and we continue to expand our product lineup.

Traditionally, the rigid QA process has relied on manual testing. However, we cannot cope with rapid changes in the market if we were to stick with the old way of testing, where critical issues are only found at the quality assurance stage. On the other hand, prioritizing speed at the expense of quality will make product delivery unsustainable in the long run.

So far, our development engineers have maintained quality by using Autify or other tools when adding features or when issues occur. However, as the service has grown, we have reached a phase where we must elevate the quality of our software test automation platform to the next level.

To achieve faster release cycles and high quality, we are looking for a Quality Assurance professional who will constantly scrutinize what an ideal QA looks like and establish Autify's position as an industry leader.

Responsibilities

• Drive and own the quality output for the team and its products
• Understand requirements, validate acceptance criteria, design test cases, with the support of the engineering team
• Create and manage manual and automated tests across multiple products to support end-to-end testing.
• Track test gaps, quality, and productivity metrics. Work with other engineering teams to improve gaps in this data.
• Understand and fill the product gaps through internal product usage and driving initiatives with the support of engineering and business teams.
• Design, promote and improve QA processes to maintain high quality without slowing down development. This includes proposing and formulating bug prevention systems.
• Participate in incident handling and on-call rotations.

Required Qualifications

• At least 3 years of QA experience in agile software development processes.
• Experience working in teams leveraging Continuous Integration systems(e.g. CircleCI, Github actions, or Jenkins).
• Experience in developing, implementing or maintaining a scalable test automation strategy using Selenium WebDriver, Appium, Playwright or  etc.
• Collaborative team spirit with effective communication skills
• Experience working with development engineers to improve QA processes.
  • In addition to finding bugs in the testing phase, you have taken initiatives to prevent issues earlier in the development process (such as by adding automated tests in CI and reviewing specifications by the QA staff).
  • You have worked with development engineers to improve the QA process to release features more frequently.
  • You have demonstrated support for our solution direction by leveraging your understanding of the entire development cycle, software release pain points, and quality challenges, effectively translating this knowledge to benefit our customers.
  • You have attended service specifications and UI/UX review meetings and provided suggestions for improving the software quality.
• Ability to communicate and work in English
• Until a Visa can be issued, being able to work from your own country with some overlap with Japanese business hours.

Nice-to-Have

• Experience in driving workshops across different teams and specialities.
• Experience in release management.
• Holds ISTQB/JSTQB certification(s).
• Have the ability to listen, communicate and learn from developers' experiences and pain points. Will need to interface with multiple teams and support projects to improve developer experience

Desired Personality Traits

• A passion for improving the entire development process and the overall quality of the product, not just around QA.
• The drive to communicate proactively with product managers, development engineers, customer success departments, and other relevant departments to solve issues or improve the products.

Selection Process

• We will request to provide references after the final interview.
• The interview steps might change depending on the hiring status in our pipeline.
• We can arrange casual interviews before the coding test upon the candidate's request. (Subject to availability of both parties)

About the Engineering Team

Our Team

Autify's engineering team is international, with more than half of the engineers being foreign nationals and all developers being English speakers. We have a good culture where members respect each other's backgrounds. Since we have two products, Autify for Web and Autify for Mobile, our development engineers are divided into two teams corresponding to each product. We have about 30 front-end, back-end, and technical support engineers who work closely with engineering managers, product managers, QA managers, designers, and machine learning engineers. The product manager is in charge of the general roadmap. The product manager develops a rough roadmap and works with the engineers and designers on the details of each feature and bug fixes before implementation. Depending on the size of the feature, we appoint a feature lead from among the engineers to be in charge of the project and give them the discretion to make technical decisions.

Our Development Process

We create a ticket about what kind of function we will develop. In some cases, the product owner creates it based on user feedback; in other cases, each team creates bugs and investigation requests directly. 

The development cycle consists of one Sprint, which takes two weeks. Development tasks are assigned during the planning stage on the first day of the Sprint, and we hold a daily standup meeting to check the overall progress and any problems. (If there is a time difference, it is done at lunchtime).

We review code on GitHub. After the review, the merged branches are automatically deployed to the staging environment, and E2E tests are performed (which Autify does itself).

After testing on the integrated branch, it's deployed to the production environment. Deployment is done several times a week as needed. We also hold sprint ceremonies like Sprint planning, feature refinement and sprint retrospective sessions. The developer will demonstrate the developed function to all employees at the end of the Sprint in the Sprint Demo.

Tech Stack

• Backend: Ruby, Ruby on Rails, Go
• Frontend: JavaScript, TypeScript, React, Redux, Styled Components
• Machine learning: Python, PyTorch, Kubernetes, GPT-4
• Database: PostgreSQL, Redis
• Test: Appium, Selenium, WebdriverIO, Puppeteer
• Infrastructure: AWS, Docker, Terraform, Packer, MacStadium, GoogleCloud
• Monitoring: Datadog, New Relic, Sentry
• CI/CD: CircleCI, GitHub Actions
• Source code management: GitHub
• Project management: Jira
• Misc.: G Suite, Slack, Notion, Gather, Zoom, Miro, 1Password, Mixmax, Calendly, etc.

Employment Conditions

Employment Status

• Permanent employee (Full-time)
• Probation period: 3 months after joining the company (conditions are the same as permanent employment)

Bonus

Holidays/PTO

• Complete a five-day workweek system (National holidays, Year-end and New Year holidays, etc.)
• Unlimited paid time off

Benefits

• Equipped with various social insurance
• Regular health checkups
• Stock option
• A laptop PC will be rented when joining the company
• Remote work allowance
• English learning support
• Skill-up support
• Visa sponsorship
• Relocation bonus
• Relocation housing support