Senior Quality Engineer

Preamble & Mission

We're disrupting the insurance industry with our platform Renew, which insurers use to build mathematical models to make complex pricing decisions. Modelling the answer to questions such as:

• What are the chances that SpaceX's next launch will fail? and
• What are the chances of Kanye West cancelling his sell-out tour?

Renew is self-serve - allowing insurance professionals to login to our development platform and build their own models in a "pro-code" environment, using the Python open source language.

There is a huge amount of appetite in the insurance industry to learn more about Python and how it can help throughout the value chain, and at hx we believe in being net contributors to the insurance industry.

With Renew we’ve built an amazing cloud-based product around a highly flexible and scalable platform, and this has led to rapid growth of our customer base. As we further grow it, we need to ensure that we can accelerate our frequency of platform development and change without compromising on product quality.

This is why your mission will be to build world-class testing processes. This includes, but is not limited to, testing of: functionality, new features, deployments, regression, load, performance, and accessibility. You’ll also have significant input into areas such as security scans, code quality and test coverage tools, disaster recovery planning and backup, and many more.

We aren’t looking for people to sit and run manual test suites, our goal is that the bulk of our tests should be fully automated and run as part of our build and deployment workflow – manual tests being the rare exception.

As a Quality Engineer you’ll be working alongside our Heads of Excellence, Backend, Frontend and our CTO to fulfil this goal. You will be responsible for reviewing and creating new and improved test processes. You’ll then work to automate them wherever possible, adding them to our development and deployment workflows. To do this you’ll have the full support of our front/backend and platform Engineer teams and will liaise with them on the design and implementation.

We have test tooling in place to support our platform, but are open to changing all facets of it – we aren’t precious about use of any particular tool and so this is a great opportunity to come in and help implement new tools, practices and ways of working, and make everything state of the art!

We are looking for someone with a passion for quality, who doesn’t accept the status quo and who won’t let minor ‘niggly’ issues remain unsolved. We set a high barrier for quality in all areas of our development work, and quality engineers are key in leading on this.

Key Responsibilities

Note: hx is still a relatively early-stage business, and our culture prizes initiative highly - as such this section is a good indicator of your role, but the list isn’t exhaustive. The right candidate will seize the opportunity we have to build out an insurance industry first community, and teach it what good looks like!

Working with the Head of Excellence you will be responsible for:

• Reviewing our current testing processes and procedures.
• Designing improvements to them, create best practices for all areas of testing and quality.
• Working with platform engineers, improve or redesign our build and release processes - ensuring that we have the very best possible continuous development and deployment workflows which fully test code as part of the pipeline.
• Implementing performance and load testing tools, ensuring that Renew performs to and exceeds customer requirements.
• Assisting with designing disaster recovery and outage-restoration processes.
• Developing tests to run against newly built customer environments to ensure readiness for use.
• Designing and implement regression tests, removing the need for manual regression testing.
• Acting as an escalation point in the support process. The intention is that this is primarily an in-hours role, but as with all scale-outs there may be some occasional out-of-hours (evening and weekend) support requirements.

Persona

If you're the right fit for this role, you will be able to show clear evidence that you:

Are an enthusiast

This is one of the defining characteristics of all hxers, and permeates work and play for us. We actively seek out lifelong learners who enjoy "levelling-up" as part of their daily life; this means you will be:

• Deeply interested in the start-up and high-growth sector and ecosystem: its quirks, unique characteristics and requirements
• Passionate about quality and ensuring that our customers and developers have the very best experience.
• Determined to prevent customer problems and outages by ensuring that our code has been rigorously tested before and after deployment
• Striving for continuous improvement.
• Persistent in asking ‘What if?’, testing the ‘unhappy’ path, identifying and pro-actively helping us to avoid potential service issues

Reflect hx and our values

• Caring and empathic, you look to improve not just your own and our customers lives, but those of everyone at hx
• Organised and a good planner - able to manage engagements with multiple customers and hx teams in parallel
• Great at building and sharing knowledge, as a senior engineer one of your responsibilities is to propagate your knowledge to other engineers and help them develop.
• Persistent and confident in your approach (but without ever being arrogant!)

You'll also need to be comfortable with our way of working, which is remote-hybrid, international, and service-oriented. We are an enterprise technology firm with a multinational client base - we let flexibility, customer-centricity and doing the right thing guide how and where we work.

Experience and skills

hx is far less interested in counting years over evidence of delivery, and our requirements reflect this.

To be successful in this role, you'll need to have:

• Successfully worked in a high-performance rapid-development environment which includes multiple development teams and workstreams.
• Had at least 5 years of testing and quality engineering experience.
• Designed and implemented automated functional and regression testing suites.
• Created new test processes as well as enhancing existing ones.
• Demonstrated a commitment to high quality and pro-active improvement.
• Worked with internal development engineering teams to scope and specify the testing around new platform features.
• Excellent knowledge of the types of testing needed for both the front and back-end sides of web-based SAAS platforms.
• Strong knowledge of performance and load testing, and resiliency/scaling processes.
• Acted as support, and ideally as an escalation point, during customer issues.
• Bonus points if you have done this with a high-growth company, where the product has been changing and updated regularly, requiring a dynamic and agile approach to ensure the content remains current!

Tech skills:

• Knowledge of languages such as Python, Rust or Go
• Experience using JavaScript libraries like NodeJS or React
• Significant experience of standard testing tools and frameworks.
• Experience working with Development or Product Engineering teams
• Strong experience with CI/CD and other deployment tools.
• Understanding of performance monitoring, management tools, testing tools and platform architecture design
• Familiarity with security and compliance processes.
• Bonus points if you have exposure to insurance and actuarial domains, but not necessary.

What do we offer?

• Competitive salary + very staff-friendly EMI share options
• £5,000 annual learning & development allowance
• 33 days annual leave (inc. public holidays)
• £250 gadget-for-the-office budget (on hiatus due to Covid)
• Top-spec equipment (laptop, wireless keyboards, screens, etc)
• Huge opportunity for personal development and mastery as we grow together
• Regular remote hackathons, lunch & learns, socials and games nights
• Team breakfasts and lunches, snacks, drinks fridge, fun office @ The Ministry
• Annual team trip somewhere warm (sadly on hold due to COVID19)

Diversity @ hx

We are committed to diversity and equal opportunity. We’re a talented and high-energy, but low-ego and kind team who believes that the more inclusive we are, the better our work and culture is. We are not yet where we want to be in terms of balance, but it is our mission to build a team that represents a variety of backgrounds and perspectives and we are working hard towards that goal.

If you like the sound of this role but you’re not totally sure whether you’re the right fit – please apply anyway and we’ll let you know either way. Remember: you miss every shot you don’t take!

PS - Check out our blog at https://www.hyperexponential.com/blog