About Toptal
Toptal is a global network of top freelance talent in business, design, and technology that enables companies to scale their teams, on-demand. With $200+ million in annual revenue and over 40% year-over-year growth, Toptal is the world’s largest fully remote company.
We take the best elements of virtual teams and combine them with a support structure that encourages innovation, social interaction, and fun. We see no borders, move at a fast pace, and are never afraid to break the mold.
Position Description
Toptal is a quality-first company. While quality is the responsibility of the whole team, our Software Engineers in Test lead this effort.
We believe that top quality can only be reached by attending it through three different angles:
- Product knowledge - completely understanding the product and its functionalities.
- Engineering domain - increasing the test coverage or solving their gaps as well as understanding its architecture and design and being able to find opportunities of improvement or possible issues.
- Process audit - identifying quality issues that can be prevented with simple changes in our software development process.
The Core Tools team develops and maintains tools used internally by our engineering teams at Toptal. We handle the tooling behind our Incident Management framework and our Product Development Process in close partnership with our organizational Program Management Office team that handles them from the Business perspective. In addition, we maintain other important tools that bring performance visibility to our Engineering Managers and handle part of the Career Progression of all the Engineering functions.
Most of the tools we develop use the Ruby on Rails framework, but we also handle others using NodeJS, TypeScript and Javascript. You will need to love and welcome learning different technologies and be able to switch context between the applications and technologies we support every few weeks based upon the defined priorities.
As a Senior Software Engineer in Test, your work will be focused on both maintaining and improving the high-level test coverage of our tools as well as assisting the team in analyzing the complex technical initiatives by finding corner cases that should be handled correctly and ensuring all of them meet the high-quality standards of Toptal.
This is a remote position that can be done from anywhere. Due to the remote nature of this role, we are unable to provide visa sponsorship. Resumes and communication must be submitted in English.
Responsibilities:
You will test and validate first-class software web applications or bots serving our internal engineering function that will be connected with multiple third-party apps like Jira, Slack, Sentry, Zoom, Twilio, and other internal web services.
Among other responsibilities:
- Work to maintain and improve our automated test suites in RSpec and Jest, as well as to setup from scratch automated test suites for new products or tools.
- Create detailed, comprehensive and well-structured test plans and test cases.
- Estimate, prioritize, plan and coordinate testing activities.
- Identify, record, document thoroughly and track bugs.
- Review the work of your colleagues from the white box (PR reviews) and black box (manual and exploratory) testing perspectives.
- Continuously improve your team’s processes, brainstorm ideas, and communicate your status and progress.
- Review requirements, specifications and technical design documents to provide timely and meaningful feedback, as well as to identify corner cases that should be addressed properly.
- Work closely with the stakeholders, and users from the preliminary planning through to having a holistic view to plan and deliver new features.
- Track quality assurance metrics, like defect densities and open defect counts.
- Stay up-to-date with new testing tools and test strategies.
- Development experience including design, implementation, documentation, and maintenance of test automation in Ruby on Rails and NodeJS.
- Mentor other people, provide feedback, and grow as a part of the team.
- Actively participate in meetings including Scrum meetings, squad meetings, pair programming sessions, etc.
In the first week, expect to:
- Begin your onboarding and integration into Toptal.
- Get familiar with our product portfolio and team structure.
- Learn our processes.
- Get acquainted with our tech stack.
In the first month, expect to:
- Implement your first automated tests.
- Have strong knowledge of Toptal’s business.
- Start working on regular team tasks and become familiar with the business domain.
- Attend regular meetings, like technical calls, retrospectives, and the monthly Engineering All-hands meeting.
In the first six months, expect to:
- Develop automated tests to ensure that our products flawlessly support our business and behave at sky-high quality standards.
- Setup the automated test suite from scratch for our new products and tools.
- Be actively engaged in the development of new features your team works on.
- Start contributing to the technical topics as well, understand the application, and the general testing system.
- Deliver value in regular cadence.
- Get comfortable with the daily work routine of our team.
- Review code written by your colleagues.
- Be ready to propose improvements to Toptal’s processes and codebase.
In the first year, expect to:
- Become a champion of new ideas that will thrive to achieve the purpose of our company while ensuring the quality culture that we value the most.
- Become a key part of the team, be responsible for the QA and overall testing activities, and help others inside and outside of the team.
- Develop your team’s trust to make strategic decisions in regard to tools or methods involved in the QA process.
- Significantly increase the automated test coverage of our team’s products including some end-to-end tests, when necessary, help out the team with manual and exploratory testing.
- Have a detailed understanding of Toptal’s technical stack, collaboration rituals, processes, performance, and future work.
- Determine what your career path looks like at Toptal.
Requirements:
- Have 5+ years of Quality Assurance and test automation.
- RSpec, Cucumber and Jest are our daily bread and butter.
- Being a team player - avoiding solo performances, helping others.
- Great spoken and written communication skills.
- Familiarity or willingness to learn Cypress, Ruby on Rails, JavaScript/TypeScript and GraphQL.
- Full autonomy in every aspect of daily work - be able to unblock yourself by finding the right people or help.
- Hands-on experience with both white box and black box testing.
- Have a solid hands-on experience with automated testing tools, specially testing backend applications.
- Hands-on experience with different tools - Testing tools, Version Control systems (Git), Test Management Software, Bug Tracking software (Jira), CI tools (Jenkins, Github Actions, etc.), Docker and Kubernetes (a plus).
- Critical thinking and enthusiastic skepticism.
- Bonus points for hands-on experience testing Slack bots and Jira add ons.
- You must be a world-class individual contributor to thrive at Toptal. You will not be here just to tell other people what to do.
