Principal QA Engineer

Posit is seeking a Principal QA engineer with strong leadership, analysis, and automation infrastructure experience. The team you will be working with builds IDEs for Data Scientists. We will continue our focus of creating a delightful user experience for our Data Science community that is focussed on both the R and Python languages.

You will be working on a team that has been in the progress of building features for our users over the last 9-12 months. We are looking for a Principal Quality Engineering leader who can help organize our team’s tasks while also being able to contribute in our day to day work. This will be a heavy player coaching role to ensure we are on track with our work and our stakeholders have the information they need.

This role offers a great opportunity to drive the quality of our software through understanding what our customers want, what our stakeholders are expecting, careful testing and thoughtful analysis. If you are an optimizer who is passionate about improving existing systems, driving new technology, and working with amazing people, this job could be for you.

What you’ll own:

• Define manual and automated test strategies and Definition of Done for projects. The team you will own quality for handles many distinct features and needs a champion of quality for each one. You will drive your team to determine what needs to be tested and automated, define regression and validation requirements, solicit feedback from stakeholders, and document the test processes for the rest of the team.
• As Principal Quality Engineer for the team you will own the overall coordination, communication, and priority of the day to day QE actions on the team.
• Working closely with QA and Engineering leadership to ensure we have the correct process and strategy for our day to day work.
• Create, maintain and enhance automated test infrastructure, making automated tests easier to author, faster to run, more resilient, and broader in coverage. Depending on the project, these automated tests could be end-to-end, API, or load and performance. It is critical for the team to have automated tests and a long-term automation strategy, and we would love to hear from you how best to accomplish that.
• Develop infrastructure as code to deploy reproducible test environments in AWS, Kubernetes, docker, etc.
• Domain expertise, over time. QA engineers work heavily with other teams and often act as a connective “glue” between teams. To be effective, you will need to learn from these other teams. This will include learning about the Posit products and what is most needed for the projects we support.
• User advocacy for new features and enhancements to products and projects

What you’ll help with:

• Collaborate with the developers and other stakeholders to make sure we are building the right things, and building things right
• Collaborate with other QA Engineers to coordinate test coverage, assess risk holistically, and mentor others in areas where you have expertise (as they will for you)
• Build for the future of automated tests and infrastructure

What you’ll teach:

• Both front and back end test automation best practices, helping to create repeatable and maintainable automation patterns for others to follow easily
• A quality mindset across the team. Everyone on the team owns quality, but QA should help set the tone of user advocacy
• Industry trends and new technologies related to testing and automation
• Ability to communicate across teams and stakeholders. You will be working with your QA team, Engineers, Engineering leadership, and outside stakeholders.

What you’ll learn:

• An appreciation for data science workflows
• A deeper understanding of IDE and environments needed
• New skills related to data science patterns and best practices

You have QA Skills:

• The desire to help other teams, and work with them daily in a highly collaborative environment
• Expertise in the Python language
• Familiarity the R Language
• Experience web based interfaces and IDE applications
• Experience writing automated tests, in any language . Preferred Typescript, Mocha, Python and Selenium
• Expertise in building test automation infrastructure
• Experience creating high-level test strategies for multiple products
• Curiosity and a willingness to learn new technologies
• A humble, collaborative approach to producing high-quality software
• Experience writing SQL queries to verify data
• 8+ years of professional experience in software Quality Assurance or Software Engineering

Nice to have:

• Experience with Data Science and Python user persona
• Data mining or extracting usable data from valuable data sources
• Carrying out preprocessing of structured and unstructured data
• Experience with Data Visualization Tools like matplotlib, ggplot, d3.js., Tableau that help to visually encode data

Within one month, you will…

• Get to know everyone on the product team and become familiar with our current. software development practices.
• Work through our onboarding guide and get familiar with our products.
• Verify, validate and build test automation for release work.

Within three months, you will…

• Participate in feature planning and provide feedback.
• Feel comfortable navigating the codebase and understand how things fit together.
• Have mapped out the test automation architecture needed to support your team’s needs.
• Established a mentor relationship with your teammates
• Own your teams release coordination

Within twelve months, you will…

• Plan features and drive their development.
• Share your expertise and insights with team members, contributing to the collective knowledge and skill set of the engineering team.
• Point to parts of the products that you have significantly contributed to.
• Created or enhanced our test architecture and infrastructure for your project.

Working at Posit:

• We welcome all talented colleagues and are committed to a culture that represents diversity in all its forms.
• We prioritize giving ourselves “focus time” to get deep work done. We minimize meetings and attempt to operate asynchronously.
• We are a learning organization and take mentorship and career growth seriously. We hope to learn from you and we anticipate that you will also deepen your skills, influence, and leadership as a result of working at Posit.
• We operate under a unique sustainable business model: We have over 50% of our engineering dedicated to creating free and open source software. We are profitable and we plan to be around decades from now.
• Posit is a Public Benefit Corporation (PBC) and a Certified B Corporation®, which means our open-source mission is codified into our charter. As a result, our corporate decisions balance the community's interests, customers, employees, and shareholders. Hear more about why we think this matters here.

Notable:

We offer competitive compensation with extensive human-first, people-focused benefits to prioritize your personal and financial well-being.

• 100% of medical, dental, and vision insurance premiums are covered for employees and their families! Fertility and gender-affirming healthcare is included in all of our plans.

• Supplemental mental health and wellness benefits are available via Ginger even if you don’t opt in to our insurance plans, including Ginger for teen family members.

• Posit's gender-neutral paid parental leave policy covers all new parents, including foster and adoptive parents.

• All full-time employees are eligible for 401k enrollment starting on day one.

• After six months of employment, Posit provides a substantial yearly match to employee 401K contributions.

• An annual profit-sharing bonus for employees recognizes our team’s contributions to company performance across the year.

• We are a 100% distributed team. You are also welcome to come into our Boston office.

• We offer a $400 monthly reimbursement for coworking space rental if you prefer to work away from home.

• Our Lifestyle Savings Account offers an initial deposit of $1800 and then an additional quarterly stipend of $375 to cover the costs of professional development, wellness, financial health, charitable giving, and remote work support.

• We provide a flexible environment with a generous vacation policy that encourages a minimum of four weeks PTO per year plus 13 paid company holidays.

Are you excited about this role but not sure if your experience aligns with every qualification in the job description? That’s okay. We know multiple perspectives are essential for a thriving organization and we'd still love to hear from you!

Posit is committed to being a diverse and inclusive workplace. We encourage applicants of different backgrounds, cultures, genders, experiences, abilities, and perspectives to apply. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, national origin, religion, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, age, physical disability, or length of time spent unemployed.

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