We’re looking for a quality assurance leader to collaborate with the City of Austin’s Office of Design and Delivery on incorporating effective testing practices into every software development cycle.

Overview

We are looking for an experienced, skilled, and passionate QA Engineer to establish sustainable quality assurance processes and testing methods that will allow for the continuous delivery of software products. The person in this role will ensure timely and frequent release schedules without compromising on quality and accessibility for Austin residents.

This vital position has the potential to create positive change inside our organization and across City of Austin services. The person in this role will be instrumental in shaping the future of accessible and equitable digital services at the City of Austin. We’re looking for someone who is passionate, creative, resourceful, civic-minded, and impact-driven.

Salary and benefits

• $75,000-$86,000, commensurate with experience
• Flexible hours and remote work days
• City employee discounts and perks (free transit pass for buses and metro, free admission to Barton Springs, and more)

This is a full time, 40-hour/week position with no term limit. However, it is designated as a “temporary position” within the City. This means:

• No health insurance offered during the first year of employment
• No paid vacation offered, but temporary employees can take unpaid time off as needed

You can learn more about benefits here: https://odd.austintexas.io/join/information/benefits/

What you’ll do

• Develop and own the strategy for automated and manual testing with the goal of achieving continuous delivery of our products, including our frontend resident interface (alpha.austin.gov) and backend author interface.
• Determine when to use the appropriate QA strategies, including unit testing, regression testing, cross-browser testing, accessibility testing, manual testing, and automation.
• Develop and execute comprehensive and well-structured test plans.
• Work closely with development, content, and design teams to understand new features and projects, watching out for ways their development can be facilitated by robust and efficient quality assurance.
• Coach development team in honing a testing mindset when developing new features.
• Be an advocate for testability early in the process of determining user stories and project requirements. Verify that new features, user stories, and bug reports are articulated with testing in mind.
• Collaborate with the product manager to improve our product release process.
• Build and share knowledge of web standards and best practices related to testing, QA, and continuous delivery.
• Engage with the wider quality assurance community, identifying best practices we can adopt and sharing what we’re building and learning.

What we’re looking for

• A passion for public service and a commitment to doing the hard work that’s necessary to improve city services.
• 3+ years of professional experience in creating and implementing strategies to ensure quality of software products, services, and systems.
• An understanding of both manual and automated industry best practices for software quality assurance.
• Experience implementing quality assurance and testing strategies in lean and agile development settings.
• Interest in incorporating long-term testing and automation best practices into our development workflow.
• Knowledge of best practices in web accessibility and accessibility testing tools.
• Excellent interpersonal communication skills and a desire to coach others in testing best practices.
• Ability to establish processes that recognize, value, and include different perspectives, experiences, approaches, and cultures to achieve organizational goals.
• Ability to gain and maintain the trust of project stakeholders.

Nice to have

The following are a plus but are not necessary:

• Experience with implementing or architecting automation for frontend applications.
• Knowledge of automated browser testing frameworks such as Selenium or Cypress.
• Knowledge of testing frameworks in Javascript and Python.

Minimum qualifications

• Two years of relevant work experience.
• Graduation from an accredited four-year college or university with major course work in a related field, or equivalent work experience.

Note: We are not able to sponsor H1-B visas.