Quality Assurance Engineer

Emeryville, CA

Who are we looking for?

We are seeking a software quality assurance engineer to join our team and help build the next generation of online community software. Lithium's QA engineers love to figure things out for themselves, discover the corner cases, and determine new and creative ways to break things. They enjoy working with online community software and putting themselves in the end-user's shoes. They learn fast, relish complexity, and stand up for "the way things should work." They combine visceral loathing of making the same mistake twice with a desire to automate repetitive tasks, and are always trying to find new ways to make themselves and the company more efficient.

What You'll Do

Lithium is committed to developer testing as an integral driver of software quality. If you've worked in places where engineers "throw it over the wall" for the QA team to test, you'll know what we're trying to avoid. As the QA engineer for a small agile software team, you will work with developers to design and implement an appropriate test strategy encompassing every aspect of feature development. You will drive the team as a whole to produce the appropriate test plans, encompassing a variety of strategies from manual exploration, white box test automation, upgrade testing and beyond. You will be the first to person witness the emergence of fledgling features and the last person to check that those features are ready for prime time.

Responsibilities

• Determine the appropriate testing strategy for each Sprint deliverable
• Create test plans and test conditions
• Explore features as they are being developed to identify design, testability and usability issues
• Track test results and deliver a comprehensive assessment of product quality
• Work with Developers to provide an appropriate test environment and tools for testing Sprint deliverables
• Execute manual and automated tests, interpret the results, and diagnose basic test failures
• Set up test environments, reading log files, testing APIs and inspecting databases/data files
• Create issue reports and work with Developers to resolve appropriately
• Represent product quality as part of regular bug triage and release process

Requirements

• A bachelor's degree in a technical or analytical subject, including engineering, mathematics, the sciences, or philosophy
• The ability to understand, break, develop, and fix code. Experience with Java and Linux is a plus, but we believe that the right candidates will learn technologies on the job
• Experience working with with Web technologies, including SQL, HTML/CSS, Web servers, or application servers
• Experience working with Mac, Linux, Windows and Mobile Devices
• Community software experience, including forums, blogs, social bookmarking, and social networking
• Strong analytical capabilities – we love people with backgrounds in science or math and people who enjoy puzzles
• A passion for software quality
• A start-up attitude

Lithium prefers to hire for talent and motivation rather than a specific set of skills or number of years' experience. If you think you have what it takes to make a strong contribution to a great team, send us your resume.

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