[Hiring] Senior QA Automation Engineer @Toptal

Role Description

Toptal is a quality-first company. While quality is the whole team’s responsibility, our QA Automation Engineers lead this effort. We believe that top quality can only be reached by attending to it through three different angles:

• Product knowledge - completely understanding the product and its functionalities.
• Engineering domain - increasing the test coverage or solving their gaps, understanding its architecture and design, and finding opportunities for improvement or possible issues.
• Process audit - identifying quality issues we can prevent with simple changes in our software development process.

We’re looking for a Senior QA Automation Engineer to join Toptal and work on a new product within our Core Team. You’ll be part of a small, high-velocity team building an AI-powered platform.

Your work will focus on both maintaining and improving the high-level test coverage of our tools, as well as assisting the team in analyzing the complex technical initiatives by finding and correctly handling corner cases and ensuring all of them meet the high-quality standards of Toptal.

This is a remote position. We do not offer visa sponsorship or assistance. Resumes and communication must be submitted in English.

Responsibilities

• Participate in defining, testing, and validating first-class software web applications and Slack bots serving our internal Core team.
• Work to maintain and improve our automated test suites in RSpec, Jest, Playwright, and Cypress.
• Set up automated test suites for new products or tools from scratch.
• Estimate, prioritize, plan, and coordinate testing activities.
• Identify, record, document thoroughly, and track bugs.
• Review the work of your colleagues from white box (PR reviews) and black box (manual and exploratory) testing perspectives.
• Improve your team’s processes, brainstorm ideas, and communicate your status and progress.
• Collaborate closely with stakeholders and users throughout the preliminary planning phase.
• Contribute to writing Acceptance Criteria and Definition of Done for the team’s features.
• Review requirements, specifications, and technical design documents.
• Track quality assurance metrics, like defect densities and open defect counts.
• Stay up-to-date with new testing tools and test strategies.
• Development experience, including design, implementation, documentation, and maintenance of test automation in Ruby on Rails, React, and NodeJS (a plus).
• Mentor other people, provide feedback, and grow as a part of the team.
• Actively participate in meetings, including Scrum meetings, squad meetings, pair programming sessions, etc.
• A holistic understanding of the product and users’ needs, ideally from a Product Management perspective, is a plus.

First Week Expectations

• Begin your onboarding and integration into Toptal.
• Get familiar with our product portfolio and team structure.
• Learn our processes.
• Get acquainted with our tech stack.

First Month Expectations

• Implement your first automated tests.
• Have strong knowledge of Toptal’s business and our team’s mission and vision.
• Start working on regular team tasks and become familiar with the business domain.
• Attend regular meetings, like technical calls, retrospectives, and the monthly Engineering All-Hands meeting.

First Three Months Expectations

• Start contributing to the technical topics and understand the application and the general testing system.
• Learn and take part in the utilization of the latest testing technologies.
• Deliver value in regular cadence.
• Get comfortable with our team’s daily work routine.
• Review code written by your colleagues and identify possible areas for improvement.
• Be ready to propose improvements to Toptal’s processes and codebase.

First Six Months Expectations

• Develop automated tests to ensure that our products flawlessly support our business and behave at sky-high quality standards.
• Set up the automated test suite for our new products and tools from scratch.
• Be actively engaged in developing new features your team works on.

First Year Expectations

• Become a champion of new ideas that will thrive in achieving the purpose of our company, squad, and team.
• Become a key team member, responsible for the QA and overall testing activities.
• Develop your team’s trust to make strategic decisions regarding tools or methods involved in the QA process.
• Significantly increase the automated test coverage of our team’s products.
• Deeply understand Toptal’s technical stack, collaboration rituals, processes, performance, and future work.
• Determine what your career path looks like at Toptal.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of Quality Assurance and test automation.
• RSpec, Jest, and Cypress are your daily bread and butter.
• Familiarity with Playwright, Ruby on Rails, JavaScript/TypeScript, and GraphQL.
• Being a team player - avoiding solo performances and helping others.
• Outstanding written and verbal communication skills.
• Full autonomy in daily work; unblock yourself by finding the right people or help.
• Hands-on experience with both white box and black box testing.
• Solid QA automation experience, primarily focused on adding end-to-end tests in monolithic and distributed systems.
• Hands-on experience with automated testing tools for frontend and backend applications.
• Hands-on experience with different tools - Testing tools, Version Control systems (Git), Test Management Software, Bug Tracking Software (Jira), CI tools (Jenkins, Github Actions, etc.), Docker, Kubernetes (a plus), and Google Cloud Platform (a plus).
• Critical thinking and enthusiastic skepticism.
• Bonus points for hands-on experience testing Slack bots and Jira add-ons.
• Experience or familiarity with Product Management, including understanding user needs and helping plan and deliver features, is a plus.
• Proactive problem-solver and take ownership of your work.
• World-class individual contributor to thrive at Toptal.