Quality Engineer

Job Type:

Permanent

Build a brilliant future with Hiscox
 

Position: Quality Engineer

Reporting to: Head of Quality Engineering

Location: York

Type: Permanent

Band: 2

Build a brilliant future with Hiscox The London Market tech team is a modern, agile technology department seeking to work as closely as possible with our colleagues across the company to deliver true business value in an agile fashion. We are a group of engineers (software, data, quality), data scientists and agile practitioners. We organise ourselves into chapters according to these professional disciplines. You would be joining our quality engineering chapter.

From these chapters we build cross-functional squads aimed at delivering business value in particular areas. These are tight-knit Scrum teams working closely with product owners and business stakeholders to determine what insights are required and working to deliver them. This means our engineers must be enthusiastic in applying technology to drive results and advocate for appropriate solutions.

We are seeking a motivated and enthusiastic professional who will champion quality at every stage of our process, ensuring that requirements are translated into robust tests that validate our technologies meet our ambitious standards. The candidate should be eager to embrace new challenges, demonstrate a willingness to learn automation and other technologies, and adapt quickly to our squads.

We build teams that can get stuff done and deliver value incrementally to the business; teams that understand what agility really is and always looks to keep things simple. We adopt best practices in the cloud and understand the importance of DevOps to ensure we can easily build, deploy, test and monitor solutions when they go into production.

Hiscox London Market is actively seeking a dynamic Quality Engineer to support our London Market Engineering team and immediately get involved in shaping the way we ensure quality across all our technology platforms.

The role

Within this role you will be responsible for ensuring the quality of our web applications, APIs, and data platforms. This will involve working closely with the software engineers and product owners in understanding, defining, and testing of the application. You will be the quality champion and driving quality by design within the squad. You will ensure our test suites give appropriate coverage to reduce the chance of regression defects. You will also ensure our disaster recovery and failover protocols are fully tested. To achieve this, you will have good understanding of key components of our underlying technologies.

As a Quality Engineer, you will work along with other chapter members (QEs, AEs, SDETs) and will be a quality champion across the London Market Tech team. You will guide cross-discipline squads and influence them to ensure that they build quality as at forefront of all we do. You will be a fierce proponent of requirements-driven testing. You will enhance the quality assurance aspects of the squad using best practices. You will take initiative to upskill your programming skills to transform to an Automation Engineer.

What you will be doing

· Design, execute, and document functional test cases, reporting bugs with detailed documentation and tracking their resolution.

· Work with the Agile team during planning, development, and release to make sure things are done on time and done well.

· Analyse requirements for features, integrations, and new projects, and determine testing needs.

· Collaborate with developers, stakeholders, and the rest of the QA team to share test outcomes, discuss strategies, and improve processes.

· Understand the end-to-end functioning of the applications and be a Subject Matter Expert within the squad.

· Keep test documentation up to date and accurate to facilitate ongoing delivery cycles.

· Assist Automation Engineers and SDETs in building the test automation scripts.

· Work along with the wider QE practice and support in adopting the best practices within your team

· Work collaboratively with team members located in the United Kingdom, Portugal, Poland, and India to deliver value

Our must haves

· Proven experience in manual testing, including creating test cases, executing tests, and identifying defects

· Solid experience in Quality Engineering processes and thorough understanding of testing methodologies including behaviour-driven testing, unit testing and data-driven testing.

· Experience in creating Test artifacts such as Test Plan, Test Strategy, Test Metrics and reporting etc.

· Hands-on experience with test management and test reporting tools such a Jira, Azure test plans etc.

· Strong logical thinking skills with the ability to approach problems methodically and deliver effective solutions.

· Experience working in a truly agile style.

· Willingness to take initiative to learn technical skills and scale up to become an Automation Engineer.

· Good Team Player.

· Fluency in English and Excellent Communication skills.

Our nice to haves

· Experience in writing tests in BDD format

· Experience with the API testing using Postman or related tools.

· Sufficient SQL expertise to develop effective backend database tests.

· Exposure to any test automation tool

· Understanding of any programming language

· Exposure to CI/CD Pipelines

Our technology

We adapt market leading technologies to solve our business problems. Our business is a very niche and coveted area within insurance. Our suite of applications encompasses web-based platforms, API endpoints, desktop software, and cloud solutions. We are also making significant strides in integrating AI technologies across our application landscape. We seek people with a good understanding of quality engineering, software development practices and can apply this knowledge in enhancing the quality standards.

Our technology platforms include web applications developed in C# interacting with backend services (APIs) and backed by Microsoft SQL Server databases. We operate data platforms using Snowflake cloud data warehouse orchestrated with Python code and Prefect for ELT. We have a hybrid on-premises / Azure cloud infrastructure and are adopting a cloud first / provider agnostic approach.

We take a DevOps approach and strive for continuous integration / continuous deployment. We use Azure Pipelines to deploy our code. We deploy infrastructure the same way using Terraform and Docker.

Diversity and flexible working at Hiscox

At Hiscox we care about our people. We hire the best people for the job, and we are committed to diversity and creating a truly inclusive culture, which we believe drives success.

We have also learned over the past couple of years that working life does not always have to be in the office and have adopted hybrid ways of working to encourage a healthy work life balance. We anticipate the successful candidate for this role will be in the office up to 2 days per fortnight.

We see it as the best of both worlds: structure and sociability on one hand, and independence and flexibility on the other.

Why work here?

If you want to help build a brilliant future; work with amazing people; be part of a unique company culture; and, of course, enjoy great employee benefits that take care of your mental and physical wellbeing, come and join us.

Get in touch

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About us

We are a global, specialist insurer headquartered in Bermuda and listed on the London Stock Exchange. With 3,000 employees and 32 offices in 12 countries we are a business with lots of opportunity for people with talent, spark, and lots of ambition. If you want to build a distinguished career with a company that prioritises strong values – such as integrity and courage – where our people always pull together to do the right thing for each other and our customers, then we would love to hear from you.

Work with amazing people and be part of a unique culture