Example job ads for Craftsman Testers

Last updated: 8th August 2020

Intro

I’ve created these job descriptions for some roles I was interviewing and hiring for in early 2020, in order to try and “catch” a specific type of Tester, deeply in line with the values I’d search for a “Commando” Tester and/or a Test Jumper.

The industy is mostly filled with vain/shallow job descriptions when it comes to sourcing for Testers and Testing Experts, and oftentimes it takes the job descriptions from the same pile of goo: from the cheerleading community “we need someone positive, friendly, to tell us everything is ok and assured” onwards to the default “standardized QA to assure quality, zombie eats brains” community.

I’ll update this post through time, and it serves me as a quick reference guide for any new positions I’m working as a hiring manager. Feel free to adapt it or reuse it or send me questions about it through my contacts.

Other posts related to the topic of job descriptions that might interest you: The description dance and What hiring managers want (QA Edition).

Advice

Make it apparent (or implicit) on the description that you know the lingo:

• There’s no such thing as “Automated Testing”, since Testing is a human complex activity cannot be automated, but logical checks (commonly known as unit, integration, sanity, … “tests”) can be automated and put into scripts;
• No dumb/shallow references to “we need someone to assure our quality”, “someone strong at QA processes”. If you need someone that knows how to setup CI pipelines for automated checks, state it. If you need someone who will be trying to extract some metrics related to Testing state it. If you need someone who will provide you with detailed Evidence of testing (because maybe you’re insecure), also state it in the job description. It’s better to be bold and straight to the point, even if for reasons that will paint you as “imperfect”, that to be shallow and vain.
• …

Example 1 - Experienced (“Battle-hardened”) Tester

We are currently looking for an Experienced (Senior) Software Tester to join our <insert human description of your team>. As a member of our team you will use your experience to improve and extend capabilities of <insert human description of your problem>.

As part of the team you will be responsible for:

• Testing complex programs and services used by millions of consumers, with direct impact on revenue of the company.
• Hunting down for problems, confusion and risk in software products using any tools and means fitted towards the context of both development and consumer, and communicating your findings in an efficient way to fellow colleagues and to stakeholders who matter.
• Guiding automated checks development efforts used in Sanity/Healthcheck/Regression check suites across multiple markets, test environments, and infrastructure, on an API, web client, and mobile client level (iOS and Android);
• Creating balanced and “straight-to-the-point” evidence of testing with enough relevant information fitted to the fast-development cycles of our feature teams.
• Coaching fellow testers and development colleagues in context adapted testing efforts and well grounded testing principles.
• Being a critical central piece in providing information with regards to the health of critical services deployed that serve consumers worldwide.

Knowledge, Skills and Abilities:

• Minimum 3 year experience in core testing role (such as Software Tester, Coding Tester, Test Engineer, Quality Assurance Engineer, …).
• Strong and well grounded understanding of Testing, its importance, and its differences to typical industry understandings of Quality Assurance and Quality Control.
• Strong Context-driven Mindset.
• Excellent ability to debug and analyse incidents or complex bugs by being able to review, study and interpret code, logs, alerts and metrics.
• Solid Experience with some of the following technologies: git, Java, Javascript, Python, Typescript, Kubernetes, Postman, Appium, Charles Proxy, jMeter, k6.io, locust, Cucumber, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, DynamoDB, Elasticsearch, Kibana, Kafka, Cassandra, AWS web services, bash scripting, Jenkins.
• Solid experience performing: deep hands-on experiential testing and load & performance testing.
• Experiences performing Chaos testing.
• Having been part of On-Call Support lines for critical software projects.
• Having been crucial tester in the conception, development and delivery of some software projects running in production.

Education Required:

• University degree in Software engineering or related studies.
• English, Professional working proficiency.
• 3 to 5 years of experience as Software Tester with coding skills.
• Training in Black-box Software Testing (BBST) and/or Rapid Software Testing (RST).
• Any kind of Quality related Certifications (like ISTQB) are nice to have but are not a differentiating factor.

Example 2 - Junior (Well-grounded) Tester (variant of the above)

We are currently looking for an Junior Software Tester to join our <insert human description of your team>. As a member of our team you will use your experience to improve and extend capabilities of <insert human description of your problem>.

As part of the team you will be responsible for:

• Testing complex programs and services used by millions of consumers, with direct impact on revenue of the company.
• Hunting down for problems, confusion and risk in software products using any tools and means fitted towards the context of both development and consumer, and communicating your findings in an efficient way to fellow colleagues and to stakeholders who matter.
• Coding and helping maintain automated checks used in Sanity/Healthcheck/Regression check suites across multiple markets, test environments, and infrastructure, on an API, web client, and mobile client level (iOS and Android);
• Creating balanced and “straight-to-the-point” evidence of testing with enough relevant information fitted to the fast-development cycles of our feature teams.

Knowledge, Skills and Abilities:

• Minimum 1 year experience in core testing role (such as Software Tester, Coding Tester, Test Engineer, Quality Assurance Engineer, …).
• Raw understanding of Testing, its importance, and its differences to typical industry understandings of Quality Assurance and Quality Control.
• Context-driven Mindset.
• Ability to debug and analyse incidents or complex bugs by being able to review, study and interpret code, logs, alerts and metrics.
• Experience with some of the following technologies: git, Java, Javascript, Python, Typescript, Kubernetes, Postman, Appium, Charles Proxy, jMeter, k6.io, locust, Cucumber, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, DynamoDB, Elasticsearch, Kibana, Kafka, Cassandra, AWS web services, bash scripting, Jenkins.
• Experience performing: deep hands-on experiential testing and load & performance testing.
• (Nice-to-have) Some experiences performing Chaos testing.
• (Nice-to-have) Having been part of On-Call Support lines for critical software projects.

Education Required:

• University degree in Software engineering or related studies.
• English, Professional working proficiency.
• 1 year of experience as Software Tester with coding skills.
• Training in Black-box Software Testing (BBST) and/or Rapid Software Testing (RST).
• Any kind of Quality related Certifications (like ISTQB) are nice to have but are not a differentiating factor.