QA Automation Engineer

MINIMUM 4 YEARS OF RELEVANT SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT REQUIRED. THIS IS A LOCAL, FULL-TIME POSITION. SPONSORSHIP IS NOT AVAILABLE AT THIS TIME.

The Team

We’re an energetic team of repeat entrepreneurs, and we’re excited to be building the next generation of e-commerce software! We’re a team of 7, and we’ve worked together in the past to build exciting, and successful, software platforms. We wear hats, a lot of hats. It’s basically a hat shop. But at the end of the day we’re creators who love to work hard and learn from each other.

We might debate fiercely in the office, but at the end of the day we’ll all share a few pints and laughs. We celebrate our successes and failures equally, and we never let an idea go unchallenged.

Syndic8:

We’re building the first true communication platform (enterprise SaaS) for e-commerce. There are many “point” solutions available, that tackle specific problems for a specific type of organization. Syndic8 takes a higher-level approach by coordinating multiple disparate activities, both within and between e-commerce companies.

Our Tech

We’re Java + Jetty + λ in the back, Angular + S3 on the front. Everything is containerized with Docker and orchestrated using Kubernetes, pipelined with Jenkins, and deployed to ephemeral pods. Experience with Jersey and Jetty are a major plus. We’re using microservices, but are also mindful of over-engineering the solution. We’re also always careful of vendor-lock, especially with respect to our cloud provider.

You

You are a one-man SWAT team. You are as comfortable designing as you are executing; you’re self-directed and confident, yet flexible enough to roll with the incredible pace of change in a small startup. You enjoy autonomy more than being given a task list (although those are fun too) – you are a true creator. There’s no room for micromanagement here.

You will be responsible for all things testing. You will create a ground-up program incorporating our progress to date, and work with our Head of Cloud Ops to incorporate logical gates and automation. You’ll work with our developers to ensure that unit tests are as they need to be, educating and steering the entire team where we may need to adjust.

You understand that if something hasn’t been laid out for you, that means we expect you to make the appropriate analysis & decisions yourself, own your decision, and run with it. You also understand that, as with any pivot, we often have to scrap the beautiful things we’ve created to create better product-market fit.

You’ll be a skills fit if you

• have expert-level experience with testing frameworks, such as Arquillian, Cucumber, JUnit, TestNG or equivalent
• have expert-level experience with UI testing frameworks, such as Selenium
• have 5+ years of architecting testing frameworks for SaaS software from the ground up, either by yourself or in a small team
• have 3+ years of experience testing against RESTful APIs
• have 3+ years of experience testing against auto-scaling, clustered, load-balanced infrastructure
• think about and own testing from all aspects; including unit, performance, security, automated, regression, and manual tests
• can code Java in your sleep
• thoroughly understand the most common AWS services (e.g. Elastic Beanstalk, Lamda, AMQ, Redis, etc.) and have architected using those tools in the past (Kubernetes too!)
• use JSON every day to build web services, RESTful APIs, etc.
• are an expert in MySQL – you think beyond simple joins to optimize queries before they cause production slowdowns
• bonus points if you have experience testing around NoSQL and Apache Spark

You’ll be a character fit if you

• enjoy the challenges and rewards of working in a very early stage startup (very strong preference for someone who has worked in a <50 person company)
• are constantly tinkering (we love tinkerers!)
• enjoy challenging the status quo, and constantly come to your team with ideas for improvement
• know when to check in for approval vs. run with an idea
• keep yourself organized and communicate well – we primarily use Jira and Slack to keep everyone on the same page, and we develop in coordinated 2-week Agile sprints
• view working for a large corporation as the death of productivity, innovation, intellectual stimulation, education, and pretty much any other goal of a company/job
• do not sit idle once a task is complete – you have a constant backlog of tasks, or things you want to learn
• have worked in a variety of team environments – distributed, remote, off-shore, near-shore, etc.
• think that TCP/IP is one of the most under-appreciated accomplishments of modern computing
• want to create (and I really mean create) a fun, hard-working environment of peers with whom you’re excited to slay the day
• don’t get wrapped up in titles, and chip in on things that need doing without asking (even if they have absolutely nothing to do with your responsibilities

What you get

• excellent benefits, including top-of-the-line health/dental/vision/disability/life insurance, 401k, commuter benefits, generous vacation, BYOD compensation, etc.
• flexible work environment – e.g. working from home, shifted hours, etc.
• potentially, equity shares in the company, depending on your experience
• the unique experience, pride and status that comes from being one of the first employees of a software startup
• the opportunity to build your own team as we expand, and shape the entire company/product
• the opportunity to “do it right” this time. We have all inherited someone else’s mess at some point, and wished we could build something from scratch to meet our own impeccable standards. It’s time to seize the opportunity.