Senior Test Automation Engineer

Job Description

*Please Note: you will need to be based in the Brisbane area to apply for this role*

Rail is set to dominate short and medium haul travel around the world. Its faster, cheaper, greener and more convenient than air travel, and it cuts down on the carbon emitting congestion of road travel. With the current climate crisis it’s more important than ever to put this mode of transport at the forefront of people's minds. For every travel company having rail as a booking option is like having vegan choices on the menu – it’s a must! The trouble is, there’s been nothing modern about rail’s online customer experience… until now.

We are SilverRail, a global tech company working to solve this problem by delivering the digital infrastructure that opens up rail to the world! Our technology is powering rail and travel agencies across Australia/NZ, Europe and the USA in both leisure and corporate markets, making it easy for people to choose rail and cut their carbon emissions.

Although we have been around for more than 10 years, and with our teams based globally in Brisbane, London, Boston and Stockholm we still consider ourselves an agile start-up business. We are using the Agile framework for all our software development, and we believe in ‘fail-fast-fail-early’ to find innovative solutions to complex problems. Our agility and refreshingly novel approaches mean we have already developed into a force to be reckoned with in the rail tech market, but we have ambitions for so much more!

The Role

At SilverRail, Quality Engineers are responsible for ensuring that our product development and delivery meets the highest quality standard. The role of Quality Engineer requires a passion and commitment to quality that extends beyond that of QA testing. It requires active participation in each stage of development from requirements to final acceptance. This includes participation in sprint planning and estimation, and holding the scrum team to account throughout the execution of each sprint.

Our Quality Engineers extensively utilise automated testing techniques to increase efficiency and reliability of testing efforts in a continuous integration environment. Each works as a member of a fast-paced Agile software engineering team, contributing their technical expertise and actively collaborating and engaging with their colleagues respectfully while maintaining absolute focus on quality.

You will also have a responsibility for contributing to the maintenance and development of engineering capability, standards and knowledge shared by QEs across all scrum teams. This requires experience and expertise, an ability to develop and clearly articulate a technical vision and practical strategies to support it, and a flexible and collaborative attitude that respects and takes account of the unique strengths of every member of the QE team.

Key Responsibilities

• Repeatedly apply good judgement in selecting methods, tools and techniques.

• Monitor, participate in and introduce industry level thought leadership to our team, to ensure we are always striving for technical excellence, taking responsibility to avoid technical debt build-up, and constructively challenging the engineering status quo when necessary.
• Contribute directly to the work of an agile product engineering team made up of a mixture of software, test and cloud engineers. Actively participate in scrum processes.
• Define acceptance criteria, including for non-functional requirements such as performance, scalability and security.
• Devise and code fully automated test plans & test cases to validate these criteria.
• Own and manage test environments, configurations and processes (working closely with teammates with devops expertise on development of robust CI pipelines incorporating automated testing).

• Review and report test results, collect and report on test data and trends.
• Execute manual tests where required (typically exploratory).
• Consistently demonstrate an influence over engineering approaches to ensure that outcomes are designed with testability in mind.

Competence and Skills

• At least five years of hands-on experience in software testing and test automation.
• Understanding of testing best practice approaches, techniques and test levels across the test cycle.
• Highly capable and experienced with at least one programming language. Ruby is preferred.
• Highly capable and experienced with at least one BDD test automation framework. Cucumber is preferred.
• Very high level of skill in test automation (including e.g. development of mock services where appropriate), striving for clarity and maintainability, and demonstrating an understanding of the trade-offs involved.

• Strong experience with incorporation of automated testing into continuous integration processes, using tools such as Bamboo and Jenkins.
• Experience providing technical leadership to a team of capable individuals, guiding and supporting their work, enabling and facilitating their journey towards excellence in their domain.
• Outstanding communication skills and ability to influence both within and across teams.
• A focus on continuous improvement and innovation.
• Natural instinct to take ownership, doing what is needed without being asked, and following through to completion.

• Ability to work autonomously within established guidelines, building robust automations that are familiar and intuitive to other team members.
• Being helpful, respectful, approachable, collaborative and team-oriented, building strong working relationships and a positive, collegial work environment. Supportive of others in new concepts.
• Passionate about quality and customer-focused. Always striving for high customer satisfaction.
• Ability to communicate a clear understanding of the entire SDLC, including with a diverse range of (non-technical) stakeholders.
• Previous practical experience working with some of the following environments and technologies: Windows, Linux, docker, .NET, C#, C++, SQL, SOAP, REST, XML, JSON.

• Tertiary qualification in computing science, engineering or equivalent.
• ISTQB Certification / Certified Agile Tester (bonus).
• Experience using Agile Scrum, definition of acceptance criteria, and QE sprint task planning.

Why us?

• We have a beautiful new office in central Brisbane and we are a fully accredited flexible working company.
• We gift employees a bonus 5 days Annual Leave for Full-time Employees
• We offer private medial cover with HICA
• We provide a wealth of career development opportunities with training that is individual, focused on improving your skills and helping you become the best professional you can be.
• We have a culture of collaboration, knowledge sharing and group development across our global offices.

• A unique opportunity to work for a tech start-up that is revolutionising the way we travel.

Our values are simple: Do Good by working for a better tomorrow; Think Big Act Smart by being curious, adaptable and data-driven; and remember that through collaboration we will always be Stronger Together.

*We are a neurodiverse employer and are working hard to improve our recruitment processes, so if there is any way that we can make the recruitment experience better for you then please email us directly: hr@silverrailtech.com - all information will be treated as strictly confidential*