QA Analyst - Element (UK)

Job Description

Element is the startup which employs the core team behind matrix.org— the leading project for secure, open decentralised communication.

Matrix’s mission is to make messaging as open as email— allowing everyone to choose where their data is hosted, enjoy private conversations thanks to advanced encryption, and ultimately be in control of their own communication.

Matrix powers our flagship messaging apps for the web, iOS & Android, along with EMS our SaaS platform for personal & professional use.

We build things for everyone, and we know we can’t succeed without a diverse team. Our hiring process is designed to be humane and give candidates the best chance to show us what you can do. If we ever fall down on this, please let us know.

The Role: 6 month contract

You will be leading Element’s QA efforts, designing our test suites and procedures from scratch and having a big impact on the quality of our products.

This is a great opportunity to work on a high profile open source product and collaborate with a highly passionate user community.

• Perform exploratory testing of the Element clients on mobile and web, filing reliability and UX issues found in the wild
• Assist with acceptance testing of new features, ensuring things work correctly and provide a great experience for users
• Create and own the regression test suite for Element to be run on each release
• Perform manual regression testing of releases
• Work with test engineers to help them build an effective automation test suite
• Run community testing sessions and file high quality tickets based on community feedback
• Assist with triage of incoming issues from Github and the community

Your 6 months plan to make Element bulletproof:

• 1 month: We are regression testing each Element release and catching critical issues.
• 3 month: The frequency of hotfixes and critical issues found in production has decreased. New features are being released with good quality and have great UX.
• 6 month success measures: With your help, our regressions are largely automated and most testing is acceptance and exploratory testing.

Since (almost) everything we do is open source you can get a great feel for exactly what it would be like to work on Element - joining dev-centric channels such as #element-dev:matrix.org provides a window into the core team and the community. Come and say hi!

Requirements

About you

The most important thing is that you believe passionately in the mission of decentralisation of the internet. More specifically that you believe that communications should not be centralised in the hands of a small number of very large organisations and instead individuals should control their own data and choose who they share it with.

Additionally we are looking for someone who is:

• Smart, curious and enthusiastic
• Passionate about building software people love
• Empathetic, with both their colleagues and the end user

Your experience

• 5+ years experience as a QA tester in a D2C commercial environment
• Great sense of what a good user experience entails, attention to detail and and a deep empathy for users
• A pragmatic approach to balancing engineering time versus value to the user
• Enthusiasm for learning about the matrix protocol and decentralisation

If you have any questions before making an application reach out to Mohand (@mohandbouhadouf:matrix.org) via https://app.element.io

Benefits

Our general approach is to treat people like adults and acknowledge that by being flexible we create an environment for people to do their best work. For more details here is our manifesto.

That said specific points that differentiate us.

• Work (almost) full time on FOSS projects with high visibility and a large enthusiastic community
• The chance to work with large scale governmental installations through to high profile FOSS projects such as Mozilla or KDE.
• Option to work partially or fully remote (our head office is in London), we offer flexibility and consider ourselves to be a family friendly environment.
• People tend to stay with the company for a long time, we take this as a sign that we have a cohesive supportive culture, that we have engaging challenging work and that people can develop their skills and careers here for the long term.

Element does not discriminate on the basis of race, sex, colour, religion, age, national origin, marital status, disability, veteran status, genetic information, sexual orientation, gender identity or any other reason prohibited by law in provision of employment opportunities and benefits.