Senior Software Test Engineer
Simply Business is more than our name. It's how we approach small business insurance: Make it clear. Make it simple. Make it affordable. Founded in 2005 (with our first international office in Boston launched in 2016), Simply Business is an online business insurance brokerage that specializes in one thing: protecting the businesses that entrepreneurs have worked hard to build.
Through blending a combination of technology, data, and insurance knowledge - with 10 years of expertise in the UK in how to build great products for our customers - we are looking to simplify the insurance-buying process for all small businesses across the US.
Right now we’re at the start of that journey. We need people who are looking for a challenge and have the drive and ambition to challenge the boundaries in whatever exciting project they believe in. We believe that people work more productively and imaginatively when they are free from rigid hierarchy and structures and we’re creating a colorful and collaborative environment to help support you in meeting your ambitions.
If you’re smart, passionate about delivering brilliant customer experiences across an integrated online and offline user journey, and enjoy solving complex challenges then you should apply to join our team.
The role:
This role is also more than a practitioner role - it’s a coaching role as well. The focus of “testing” in the industry has missed a massive opportunity of spreading the wealth of testing knowledge into engineering organizations. You will be working directly with your peers to identify and communicate risks before development starts. By coaching and mentoring developers to have the necessary skills to understand quality and know how to test they can master testing to not only increase the efficiency and capacity of their teams, but also write higher quality software.
We need:
A Senior Software Test Engineer to join us in Boston.
Our testing manifesto is about testing throughout over testing at the end, preventing defects over detecting them, building the right system over breaking it & understanding testing over checking functionality. The goal is to be a subject matter expert in testing by expanding the quality mindset, thinking critically about usability, functionality, performance, security, edge cases, testing strategies and best practices.
Key Responsibilities:
- Define testing strategies pre-implementation
- Research and gain knowledge in specialized areas in the testing domain (e.g. exploratory testing, usability testing, contract testing, etc.)Emphasizing the importance of executing the right tests.
- Collaborate with product managers, have an understanding of what to test & deliver
- Promote a culture where the team creates well-defined testable acceptance criteria.
- Drive the team to perform testing during earliest stages of implementation
- Be involved in the pull request review process
- Assist in root cause analysis with customer facing issues & educate gaps in test approach
- Monitor & enhance test automation coverage and test strategy
- Identify enhancements or implementations of current/new testing tools
- Work with testing community to improve test strategies & automation efficiencies
What We Are Looking For:
- Critical & Lateral thinking
- Systematic & Systems thinking
- Change agent with effective soft skills
- Mindset to solve problems not symptoms
- Thought leader with a passion for training, mentoring and coaching others
- Understand the value of different types of testing techniques and when to apply them
- Fast to adapt to constant changes and feeling comfortable with it
- Comfortable pairing with engineers in a distributed, co-located environment
- Focus on what is most important at all times, realizing when to change the game plan and when to stick to it
- Great communication skills, both within and outside the team
- Curiosity in understanding the domain and system architecture
- Have demonstrated ownership of continuous improvement initiatives around testing
Your Skills Include:
- Deep understanding of testing principles and a variety of testing techniques and methods
- Strong understanding of Agile
- Strong desire to work collaboratively with business teams. We do not divide ‘business’ and ‘tech’ teams, we see both as one team as we are all working towards one shared goal
- Strong interpersonal skills to work well in our very open and friendly environment
- Proficiency in at least one programming language , Ruby experience is not essential. You’ll just need to be happy to cross-over to Ruby if you join us – and we will support you with that
- Understand Test Driven Development, how coding, testing (in the form of writing unit tests) and design are tightly interwoven
- Understand Behavior Driven Development, ability to work with product managers and developers to clarify business rules and capture these test scenarios for verification
- Skilled in using a variety of testing tools at all levels in the testing pyramid
- Experience having built and/or maintained test frameworks
- Worked with continuous integration tools
- Strong interpersonal skills to work well in our very open and friendly environment
Our Tech Stack:
- Ruby
- Ruby on Rails
- Scala
- MongoDB
- Spark
- Redshift
- Kafka
- Puppet
- AWS
- Docker
- HTML
- CSS
- JavaScript
- React
Our Test Stack:
- RSpec
- Gherkin
- Cucumber
- Capybara
What We Believe In:
- Continuous delivery - we currently release software to production around 14 times a day on average
- Cross functional teams – we believe in collaboration across the whole organization and we see Tech and Business teams as one team working together on projects (in fact, we even have our business product owners writing code).
- Continuous innovation - we do hackathons as one example to drive experimentation with new technologies and ways of working
- Never chaining ourselves to a technology - using the “right tool for the job
- ”Pro-active in suggesting new tools, processes and technologies – anything which will help us continually improve!
- Someone who is excited about the way we work. You can read up on us here:
What are the benefits?
Working in our Boston Office, you will have the chance to shape a business from the very beginning, and an opportunity to develop and learn new skills across various technology and business areas as you desire.
Plus there’s all the serious (but important) stuff we call "core benefits".
The ‘core’ stuff
Some of these will kick in once you’re confirmed in post, but here’s the summary:
• A salary that reflects your experience, our pay policy and the market we’re in from your first day
• Group plan for medical, dental, and prescription drug coverage
• Short term disability, long term disability and life insurance coverage
• Participation in the Company’s bonus program
• Participation in 401(k) plan with a 3% employer match
• Commuter benefits to help cut down on commuting costs
• 25 days of vacation time plus 10 company holidays
• Flexible working hours and working from home
But there’s so much more to Simply Business than insurance. We also commit to flexible working options, smart working (our offices are kitted out for you to work when and how you choose)and we have a handy online form to put in any training or conference requests.
Best of all, though, are the groups, clubs, and adventures that come with the Simply Business territory. We trek the Sahara for charity, take you on weekends away, throw epic summer parties, meet up for book groups, public speaking coaching and lots, lots more
It’s a big claim but we genuinely believe the Simply Business culture is truly unique. You sort of have to come and spend time with us to appreciate it. So get that application in and we’ll take it from there!
Our values
Everything we do comes down to these five values – empowerment, authenticity, simplicity, learning and pioneering.
In practice, these will mean something unique to every person at Simply Business, but if you’re considering working here, give them some thought. They’re at the heart of our story.
Empowerment
We believe in our people and the positive impact they can have so we enable everyone to stretch themselves
Authenticity
We celebrate diversity, avoid jargon and genuinely care about helping small businesses thrive
Simplicity
We attempt to simplify complex solutions to save our customers time and effort
Learning
We’re never done learning about new possibilities and act to explore them
Pioneering
We’re obsessed with finding new ways to create even better experiences
We want to meet you
As a company, we pride ourselves on inclusion in the workplace. We succeed as an organization because we are comprised of intelligent women and individuals from other underrepresented groups. We understand you don’t find that in a lot of companies, so we’re emphasizing it here should you feel any hesitation to apply for that reason.
The hiring process at Simply Business is focused on candidates who are enthusiastic about the role and company. So even if you don’t fit every qualification listed in one of our job postings, yet you feel you’d be a great fit, we’d love to meet you. With any luck we’ll be seeing you at an interview soon.