Lead Platform Test Engineer

It is our vision to connect the insurance community through market-leading technology. Our people are placed at the heart of this, and diversity, equity and inclusion are central to everything we do.

We know the key to achieving success is to enable a positive, inclusive, and collaborative working culture, and, as part of our commitment, we have signed up for a number of pledges and programmes designed to support and nurture our people.

• No matter where you sit or which team you are a part of, we want you to know that you contribute in helping us to shape where the company will be in the future. We would love for each employee to be able to talk with pride about our company and, most importantly, consider Open GI to be an inclusive, fun and fulfilling place to work.

Part of our QA Chapter withing the Insurance Gateway team, you are an exemplary QA who owns the Test Automation and Performance strategy, driving yourself and your team to deliver quality, helping them to follow the right set of testing practices, tools, metrics, etc. Brings a breadth of understanding around business, development, and infrastructure, domain, etc. and an understanding that “quality” manifests in all these aspects. Always has half a mind on the service-consumer, and advocates for them in all discussions. Mentors and inspires other QAs.

• Working within a fast paced and growing Platform as a Service team, you are instrumental in how we deliver quality in our tools and services to our wider delivery teams
• Influences key stakeholders and team members on the overall quality and practices
• Quality mindset and testing practices across the programme
• Excellence in testing practices and tools
• High quality and sustainable delivery to production that supports the overall business goals and user’s needs
• Robust, scalable automation suites enabling continuous delivery
• Continually reducing cycle time, numbers of failed deployments, and mean-time to-recovery. Continually increasing numbers of deployments to production

Key responsibilities

• Establishes a vision for how the QA capability will be executed within the X platform team. Works closely with wider QA and Engineering teams in ensuring we continuously evolve and improve our test practices. Mentors teams in TDD, test frameworks, integration, API, and wider testing.
• quality Strategy: Understands, implements and leads testing strategy in all areas of testing across the team and supports others in creating and choosing test frameworks. Understands the technical architecture of the application and arrives at the relevant test strategy. Helps the set-up the required types of tests in the test stack to enable fast feedback loops. Works with the wider programme team to brainstorm strategies, tools & techniques for security and performance measures at a programme level.
• Cross functional requirements testing: Ability to validate the quality perspectives of different cross-functional requirements like accessibility, usability, availability, etc across the application using relevant processes, methodologies, and tools.
• Database testing: Ability to strategize testing around database behaviours (serializable, linearizable, repeatable reads etc) and data lifecycle (extraction, transformation, etc) and establishing relevant processes, tools, and methods to ensure quality.
• Manual exploratory testing: Ability to do hands-on manual testing of the application at different layers with an understanding of quality from different dimensions like business goals, development architecture, infrastructure, user segments, etc to accredit the application as quality software.
• Test automation: ability to strategize and design test automation holistically at different layers of the application which will enable faster and continuous delivery.
• Performance testing: Ability to understand and validate various performance related requirements in an application across different layers using different tools and techniques.
• Stakeholder management: Ability to identify, analyse, plan and implement actions that engage and build relationships within and beyond the Programme, as well as sustain them long term through effective expectation management, so as to enable each party to reach their goals.
• Effective communication: Ability to address different messages and different audiences in a customized manner not only in order to achieve clear communication, but also to provoke the desired action when necessary.
• Agile & Lean Principles: Ensures teams continuously improve their Agile QA approach by guiding and championing lean and agile principles for achieving quality, adaptability, speed & alignment. This includes the practices, techniques and tools that support those principles, and an understanding of when things may or may not be applicable in a situation or context
• Giving & Receiving Feedback: solicits and engages with feedback on a continuous basis. Has timely, actionable and meaningful conversations about performance for the purpose of shaping behaviours and fostering learning, with the goal of strengthening confidence and improving the effectiveness of self and others.
• Emotional Intelligence: recognizes, understands and manages their own emotions and recognizes, understands, shares and influences the emotions of others.
• Collaboration: works with relevant roles inside and across the teams to shift quality left (e.g., pairs with BAs for Acceptance Criteria, with Developers for different types of tests, CFRs etc., with POs to understand the level of quality for the product, and with PMs and the Programme Team to highlight risks to software delivery). Supports and mentors teams and QAs in innovative testing approaches.
• Coaching and mentoring fellow team members: able to build authentic relationships by involving individuals and effectively sharing information to empower development. Closely works with fellow colleagues to support decision making processes, resolve problems and develop skills and capabilities.
• Outwardly Looking: Proactively seeks ways to improve own experience and knowledge and to close any gaps. Pursues activities that stretch and develop skills. Keeps up to date on new information, role-specific and industry news.

Qualifications

• ·Cloud Certification advantageous

Experience

• 5+ years of quality analyst experience, 5+ years of QA leadership experience
• 5+ years of experience in implementing QA Automation Frameworks to support CI/CD
• 5+ years of experience in implementing Performance Engineering and Testing to support CI/CD
• Experience of training and delegating Test Automation tasks and processes to other team members
• Experience of continuous inspection tooling for code quality
• 5+ years of experience in automated Quality reporting and dashboards
• Experience working with Extreme Programming methods
• Experience working within a cross-functional delivery team
• Experience working with Evolutionary Architecture and how to test it effectively using fitness functions
• Experience of working in Public Cloud, such as AWS or Azure an advantage

Skills

• Adaptability
• Trust
• Communicating and influencing
• Continuous improvement
• Working with others
• Customer focus
• Responding to change
• Decisiveness
• Problem solving

Aptitudes

• Drives to Outcomes: focuses on results and desired outcomes and how best to achieve them. Able to execute plans through to action. Persistent to complete tasks and a strong commitment to take action that moves things along to ensure delivery of objectives.
• Ownership & Accountability: takes personal accountability and ownership for their work. This includes personal follow through, making and defending difficult decisions and trade-offs, removing blockers, driving collective progress.
• Continuous Improvement: advances by ongoing, incremental improvement through continuous learning, questioning the status quo and trying out creative and novel ideas. Shows curiosity and has a keen interest to drive learning for themselves and others
• Improving CI/ CD practices: suggest improvements to existing in the team so that there is an uplift in the quality of the product. Able to research new tools to enhance, measure and visualise quality and implement them with the team’s support. Recognise the causes for falls in quality and takes actions to rectify them

Our mission is to be both the Technology Partner and Employer of choice for the UK General Insurance Market. Our values are central to this vision, as they represent how we collaborate to continually deliver for our customers:

• Accountability: We own our actions and shape our success on the results we deliver
• Innovation: We tackle challenges with fresh thinking and bold ideas
• Teamwork: We work together, recognising we can’t do this without each other
• Trust: We build trust on integrity, transparency and respect

We are looking for an individual who embraces our values in their actions, decisions, communications and processes to inspire positivity and, ultimately, exceptional performance.

Benefits package

• Competitive salary depending on skills and experience
• Company pension
• Bonus opportunity
• Life assurance and critical illness cover
• Cycle to work scheme
• Perkbox – an exclusive platform offering a wide range of discounts and benefits
• Holiday entitlement of 25 days per annum pro-rata, increasing to 26 days per annum after three years of service & a holiday purchase scheme
• A hybrid approach to work, with office attendance typically required twice per month.
• Opportunity for a more flexible approach to start, finish, and lunchtimes to allow you to better manage events outside of work
• Social clubs - whether you’re into your cycling, crafts, or other hobbies, we have a number of groups at Open GI where individuals who enjoy the same pursuits can get together
• Wellbeing – wills at work scheme, employee assistance programme and mental health first aiders

Please note that this role can be based in either our Worcester, Winchester or Milton Keynes locations, and we are looking for candidates who are currently based within a 50-mile radius of our offices.

To apply for this role please fill out the application form and send us your CV.