Quality Assurance Specialist/Engineer for PrivateStorage Full-time

We’re looking for a Quality Assurance Specialist/Engineer to join our team working on PrivateStorage. PrivateStorage is an end-to-end encrypted secure storage product that aims to minimize the collection of any data related to its users.

This position will lead the quality assurance process to ensure product quality and that customer requirements are understood and met. It involves working cross-functionally with various members of the team to clearly and efficiently communicate issues and feedback so it can be incorporated into the product development process.

The responsibilities for this position include:

• Establishing processes, such as checklists or otherwise, for performing quality assurance across products that we develop;
• Collaborating with developers and product owner to define acceptance criteria of features;
• Ensuring that these processes are accessible and replicable for colleagues to participate in quality assurance;
• Working with developers on the team to ensure release-specific needs are incorporated in the quality assurance of the release;
• Performing quality assurance testing on desktop, mobile and web-based tools;
• Producing automated tests (aka “UI / integration tests”) for desktop, mobile and web-based tools;
• Supporting colleagues in performing QA reviews;
• Writing up detailed tickets based on (replicable) findings from the QA review;
• Collaborate with product owners and developers when evaluating the relative importance/severity of reported issues and other tasks relating to issue-triage and prioritization;
• Writing up review summaries and recommend whether releases are ready for public release; and
• Collaborate on user research to gain insight for product design and roadmap.

The ideal person for this role has skills and/or interest in some of the following areas:

• Experience performing quality assurance for technical products;
• Participating as quality assurance within the full software development life cycle is preferred;
• Experience with some or all of the following languages and tools: Python, Haskell, Nix, Rust, and the Qt toolkit;
• Interest in helping with documenting feedback from users for consideration by developers and product manager;
• Interest and experience with data storage and networking;
• Interest and experience in Privacy Enhancing Tech, secure communications tools, security best practices, threat modeling, and network security;
• Excellent interpersonal and communication skills for working with a distributed team;
• Distributed and decentralized technologies (e.g. collaborating online via Git, asynchronous chat and other similar tools); and
• Open source software and development practices.

Least Authority is a remote-first and global organization, so location and working hours are flexible. The role can be part- to full-time, depending on skills and interests.

Read more on how to apply here: https://leastauthority.com/careers/#howtoapply

An example of what a week in the life of a Quality Assurance Specialist at PrivateStorage might look like:

Monday:

Join our full-team sync and then run through a QA checklist on a new release of the client. Collaborate with client developers to understand issues discovered during the QA process and ensure the whole team understands any problems found.

Tuesday:

Join iteration planning and make a case for spending resources fixing issues uncovered by QA. Join the whole-LeastAuthority-team sync and then do more exploratory (ie, off-script) QA work on the client software.

Wednesday:

Catch up with the infrastructure team about recent and upcoming changes deployed on the service’s backend. Develop QA processes for existing and new infrastructure functionality.

Thursday:

Run through a QA checklist on the backend infrastructure and join a whole-LeastAuthority-team presentation session. Build automation to reduce the manual effort required for the various QA checklists

Friday:

Design new QA processes to catch recently reported regressions and collaborate with the team to document acceptance criteria to help developers avoid creating such problems in the future. Collaborate with developers to design new testing practices to catch bugs before they get working on QA reviews.