Software Quality Analyst, Mid-level

This is a fully remote position, open to applicants in Brazil.

📋 Description

• Engage in story refinement alongside the Product Owner, designers, and developers, suggesting acceptance criteria, edge-case scenarios, and inquiries that minimize ambiguity prior to the story's development phase.

• Create test plans for squad stories and features, highlighting risks, critical paths, and determining what should be automated versus what requires manual validation.

• Set up local and test environments to execute test suites (both manual and automated), including dependencies, mocks, and auxiliary databases.

• Prepare, sustain, and manage representative test data sets, ensuring a balance of happy paths, edge cases, and error scenarios.

• Conduct exploratory and functional testing throughout the sprint, integrated into the same development cycle instead of as a final pipeline stage.

• Develop and uphold API and end-to-end test automation for essential flows, maintaining the health and reliability of the test suite over time.

• Verify integrations with third-party APIs and asynchronous flows, accounting for failure scenarios, retries, and idempotency.

• Ensure data consistency in the database by crafting queries to compare persisted data with expected outcomes.

• Report defects and discrepancies identified in both requirement specifications and implementations: provide steps for reproduction, evidence, user impact, and criticality assessment alongside the Product Owner.

• Assist in the analysis of production incidents, aiding in reconstructing scenarios and designing coverage to avert recurrence.

• Analyze and respond to customer tickets in production, translating recurring issues into enhancements in test coverage and processes.

• Engage in pair-testing with developers and review automated tests authored by the team.

• Oversee production deliveries and the development of acceptance criteria.

⛳️ Requirements

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Information Systems, Systems Analysis and Development, or related fields, or equivalent practical experience.

• Proficiency in English for interpreting technical documentation.

• Over 2.5 years of experience in software quality, encompassing both exploratory/functional testing and automation.

• Strong experience in testing REST APIs: authentication, headers, payloads, status codes, contracts, and versioning.

• Experience in building and maintaining test automation within at least one market stack (Cypress, Playwright, Postman/Newman, Karate, RestAssured, Selenium, or equivalents), with an understanding of their respective trade-offs.

• SQL proficiency in relational databases: ability to read and write queries for data validation, state verification, and scenario investigation.

• Capability to interpret logs and metrics in production to understand system behavior independently.

• Understanding of the test pyramid and various types (unit, integration, contract, E2E, regression, smoke), with the ability to determine when to apply each type.

• Careful management of edge cases involving sensitive data: monetary values, dates, time zones, decimal precision, and concurrency.

• Autonomy in unblocking tasks: conducts investigations prior to seeking assistance but communicates blockers promptly when help is necessary.

• Collaborative mindset: presents risks and scenarios proactively rather than solely pointing out errors, and welcomes constructive feedback on their work.

• Collaborates closely with developers during refinement and pair-testing, rather than functioning merely as an end-of-pipeline gate.

• Proactively suggests coverage or process enhancements based on observations from the squad's daily operations.

• Operates within a horizontal, multidisciplinary team, treating PMs, designers, developers, and other analysts as equals in decision-making.

• Shares insights through pair-testing, technical discussions, or concise documentation as a daily routine.

• Maintains a critical perspective on code and test scenarios generated by AI: rigorously reviews, questions, and does not accept suggestions as absolute truth.

• Displays genuine interest in the product, striving to comprehend the "why" before determining "how" to test.

• Tracks defects to their root cause instead of merely closing tickets when symptoms disappear.

• Communicates clearly in writing in Portuguese, particularly when detailing defects (steps, evidence, impact, criticality).

🏝️ Benefits

• A distributed QA culture: collaborates closely with developers, contributes to refinement, and reviews the automated tests produced by the team.

• Familiarity with CI/CD pipelines in Azure DevOps or similar systems: comprehends where automation executes, interprets execution results, and investigates intermittent failures.

• Utilizes Grafana or similar tools for production observability: analyzes structured logs, metrics, and alerts.

• Employs Docker in the local development workflow to initiate the application environment.

• Provides succinct, direct documentation of test scenarios, bug reports, and coverage decisions.

• Uses AI tools judiciously in daily tasks, maintaining accountability for what is validated and released.

• Awareness of security in sensitive processes: manages personal and financial data in tests, uses controlled test data sets, and pays attention to credential leakage.