Lead Automation Test Engineer at Kin + Carta

Job Description:

The role in a nutshell:

Kin and Carta Europe are looking for a talented Lead Test Automation Engineer to help us build and evolve our test team and test strategy across an exciting range of projects. We hire passionate, dedicated testers who love to explore and question every step of the software development lifecycle in an open environment.

At Kin and Carta Europe we believe that quality is core to everything we are involved with. We believe collaboration, empowerment, and communication are the key contributors to success. We feel that having the ability to be open and honest about the quality of what we work on is fundamental to the robustness and reliability of the products we create.

If you want to learn and grow in a supportive environment whilst doing your best work then read on...

What you can expect:

• To be a dedicated advocate of delivering quality software, and supporting your colleagues in doing the same
• To be involved in innovating and defining how the products we build will work and function
• To build and collaborate with Agile focused teams
• To bring new ideas that challenge and improve what we do at Kin and Carta, and for our clients
• To build an inclusive team culture and be a strong leader in your practice.
• To coach team members and peers from across the organisation on good quality practices
• An environment passionate about learning, growth, and autonomy
• A supportive leadership network across engineering

The type of person we’d love to meet:

• A breadth of experience in a Testing role or similar, ideally 5+ years
• Leading and evolving your team’s approach to testing and provide mentoring and support for other members in the team
• Your communication and leadership is effective at the senior stakeholder level and - you are responsible for strategic conversations
• Understanding of a variety of testing approaches (e.g exploratory, context-driven etc.) to enable best outcomes on your project.
• Experience with Agile methodologies, and able to proactively identify ways to continuously improve ways of working
• You’ve had experience using Behaviour-Driven Development (BDD) collaboratively
• An understanding of CI/CD principles and how to effectively integrate your test automation
• You can navigate complex projects, identify and surface risks and steer the team towards building great software
• You have a shift left mindset: you collaborate with the whole team to ensure quality is “designed in” from the start
• Able to share the fundamentals of a self created framework among a team, including documentation.
• Can convince others of the benefits of the chosen strategy and enable others to create and expand the automation using this strategy.
• Experience of upgrading and maintaining existing frameworks, adding new clients to it and cycling out old ones.
• Experience with coaching, line management, or any formal mentoring.

It's nice (but not essential) if you have some of these:

• Any experience with backend/API testing
• You’ve worked across a range of industries: finance, healthcare, transport, eCommerce, public sector etc.
• You’re involved with the wider testing community
• Knowledge of Test-Driven Development (TDD), methods, practices and common use cases

Tools you might have experience with:

• Applied experience using some of the following testing tools: Charles, Postman, PAW, Swagger, Cypress, Selenium, Appium etc.
• Knowledge of BDD implementations such as e.g. Cucumber for creating test automation cases.
• Experience of upgrading and maintaining existing frameworks, adding new clients to it and cycling out old ones.
• You’re comfortable using GIT, command line, used sandbox or created locally generated builds (i.e. with XCode & Android studio)

Company Benefits

• Apple kit
• Private pension
• Life insurance/critical illness cover
• Employee assistance loan
• Cycle to work scheme
• Eye care
• Season ticket loan
• Learning grant - £1000 per year
• Enhanced parental leave
• Health insurance
• Flexi-working
• Dog friendly offices

Interview Process

• Phone Screen
• 1st Stage Interview - CV/sense check
• 2nd Stage Interview - Testing competency / Scenario Interview
• 3rd Stage Interview - Interview with Lead