City of Austin - JOB DESCRIPTION

IT Quality Assurance/Test Engineer Senior

IT Quality Assurance (QA)/Test Engineer Seniors are responsible for verifying and validating if services, products, and solutions meet specified requirements through implementing quality assurance objectives and processes and monitoring and evaluating testing results against the predetermined objectives. This position leads the planning, creation, execution, and automation of test cases and works with City departments, developers, and other stakeholders to inform and improve processes.

1. Contributes to testing strategy and architecture.
2. Leads teams in support of testing strategies and activities.
3. Develops automation framework and tools to aid testing, operations, and maintenance of the data warehouse.
4. Writes and executes test plans, designs and develops test tools, debugs and reports code bugs, and pushes quality upstream.
5. Measures performance of various components (using simulated stress tests) and reports any outliers/exceptions.
6. Leads set up of multiple QA environments to work with fabricated source data, QA source data, and production source data.
7. Interprets testing needs as requirements are being developed.
8. Evaluates testability of business and technical requirements based on business/functional requirement document(s), use cases, user stories, and/or solution design documents.
9. Participates in requirement/design reviews or sprint/release planning sessions.
10. Designs impact assessment and performs impact analysis on changes to existing architecture, work processes, and systems.
11. Participates in architecture and technical specification review and provides feedback on content and testability.
12. Creates test plans.
13. Sets up and maintains test environments for both manual and automated testing.

May provide leadership, work assignments, evaluation, training, and guidance to others.

• Knowledge of different types of testing (e.g., functional, performance, and other nonfunctional tests).
• Knowledge of coding practices, concepts and design patterns to create maintainable test frameworks.
• Knowledge of DRY principles (remove and deter the creation of repeating code) and SOLID principles (object-oriented principles to create decoupled, clean code) to create, review and refactor code.
• Knowledge of SLAs, audit, and governing body policies.
• Knowledge of testing frameworks and tools and test automation frameworks.
• Knowledge of types of database structures, types of relationships in a database and types of DBMSs, NoSQL/non-relational databases, and CRUD operations.
• Knowledge of APIs design, use, and maintenance.
• Knowledge of cloud networking capabilities, VPNs, and firewall composition.
• Knowledge of automation of CI/CD infrastructure, and tools, languages, and file formats that will inform tooling decisions in the testing strategy.
• Knowledge of components and orchestration of containerization, tools and methods used for containerization, and how they integrate with testing tools and frameworks.
• Skill in leading testing strategy, functional and non-functional testing, automated testing, quality assurance and performance testing.
• Skill in software development and chaos engineering.
• Ability to collaborate with diverse roles throughout the organization to develop holistic testing strategies and select frameworks.
• Ability to frequently and incrementally deliver applications with high quality and to created effective and meaningful tests by understanding needs of stakeholders.
• Ability to report KPIs and metrics.
• Ability to create, generate and maintain test data and databases and to creatively troubleshoot problems.
• Ability to work with cross functional teams and rapidly acquire new information and skills.
• Ability to adhere to required compliance to all change management policies and procedures.
• Ability to adhere to required compliance to all information security policies and procedures.

• Graduation with a Bachelor’s degree from an accredited college or university with major course work in a field related to the job plus two (2) years experience.
• Experience may substitute for education up to four (4) years.