The Opportunity

We’re looking for a Principal QA Engineer to join our Products team. The individual we are looking for will have the ideal combination of technical and soft skills to be able to work in a cross functional team and champion Quality and Testing standards across different roles.

This is a full-time role and our offices are in Central Manchester and Rochdale. We currently offer hybrid working with the recommendation of 3 days a week in the office. However, we welcome applicants outside Greater Manchester to start a conversation for further flexibility for the right person.

Why Footasylum?

We’ve been going through a digital transformation, changing how we deliver value to our business. A big part of this change is fostering a culture of fun, honest and inclusive behaviour, enabling psychological safety and creating a place for people to do their best work in an agile way.

You’ll have the opportunity to influence our decisions, help define standards across the teams and contribute to a healthy and happy working environment that values continuous improvement and learning.

The Team

You’ll be working in a multi-disciplinary team alongside a product manager, delivery manager, developers, and a QA engineer and report to Head of QA. You are comfortable in line managing the QA Engineer(s) in your team and you’ll also contribute towards the established community of practices at Footasylum and help run the community of practice for QA engineers across all our teams to promote better ways of working.

The Products team is primarily a back-end team with full-stack experience.
The team looks after services such as Product, Pricing and Stock API services as well as integrates 3rd party tools to help us play a central part in the IT-department. The team defines and owns their own contracts as a platform team while staying in continuous communication and collaboration with the rest of the department.
As a newly formed team there will be a lot of discovery and learning from
the ‘get go’ as well as getting to know each other and alignment of
priorities.

About You

Within your current organisation, you are a team player but also capable of taking the lead on new initiatives. As a Principal QA, you coach and possibly line manage QA engineer(s) in your area. You support those around you, you're constantly learning, and work in a considerate and collaborative manner with a keen interested in new ways of working - and what value it can add for the team. For you, it’s not just about the technical solution, you want to understand how you are delivering value to the business.

You’ll coach the team to ‘shift left’, so that they focus on quality, support the adoption of automation, and help reduce the time it takes to test code and validate assumptions, creating shorter lead times and an increase in successful deployments.

You see the value in engaging with stakeholders and the wider teams at Footasylum to have early involvement to ensure that we build the right thing at the right time. Making your work open and supporting your colleagues’ career progression are things you really value, as we try and create meaningful change at Footasylum based on working together.

You will need to be comfortable with both automated and manual testing approaches, making sure we fail fast and adapt. We are looking for someone who can create safety around our APIs as well as enabling us to release value early and often through robust testing and constantly improving our standards.

You’ll need experience of

• Working in an agile environment
• Pragmatic problem solving, using root cause analysis
• Implementing an effective testing strategy
• Different types of software testing, and when to apply them (unit, integration, contract, regression)
• Using API dev/testing tools, such as Postman
• Backend experience is desirable
• Pair or mobbing on problems, sharing knowledge and removing silos
• Creating test automation steps as part of a CI/CD process
• Good understanding of no-functional requirements
• Coaching and mentoring QA engineers, able to help them level up their skills
• Connecting with different roles within the team and the department and manage stakeholder expectations

We are offering from £50,000 to £60,000 for the right person, which we assess based on your own experiences, technical skills and against the principles of our department and our ways of working.

Diversity

We recognise and value the importance of diversity to help make sure we have lots of different perspectives when we are building products and services. We know that this will help us build useful and accessible things which our customers will love. This is great news for our business. Diversity for us is also, importantly, about building happy teams full of people that want to learn and want to be inspired by each other and our different experiences.

Recruitment Process

All of our interviews are currently held online.

We review applications on an individual basis, and if we feel you would be a good fit we’ll invite you to meet with a few members of the Footasylum team for an informal chat about the role, and to see if we’re a good fit for you.
We’re not fans of coding challenges or whiteboard interviews, we value open and honest conversations and collaboration instead, giving you a chance to learn about what we’re doing in an informal, friendly environment, and to see the code you’d be working on and the team you’d work with.