Software Engineer in Test Job Family

On this page

• Responsibilities
• Requirements
• Levels
  • Intermediate
    • Job Grade
    • Responsibilities
  • Senior
    • Job Grade
    • Responsibilities
  • Staff
    • Job Grade
    • Responsibilities
• Career Ladder
• Performance Indicators
• Hiring Process

Software Engineers in Test at GitLab help grow our test automation efforts across the entire GitLab ecosystem. As a Software Engineer in Test, you'll work in a key position, where your efforts will have a noticeable impact on both the company and product. In addition to the requirements below, successful candidates and team members will share a passion for high-quality software, strong engineering principles, and methodical problem-solving skills.

Responsibilities

• Expand our existing test automation framework and test coverage.
• Develop new tests and tools for our GitLab.com frontend, backend APIs and services, and low-level systems like geo-replication, CI/CD, and load balancing.
• Have the ability to grow your knowledge of GitLab provisioning and setup tools like Terraform and Ansible.
• Setup and maintain new GitLab test environments.
• You’ll work on test automation issues related to the Quality department, the stage group you're embedded in, and the entire GitLab product. The work you’ll do will be transparent and open to the GitLab community
• Participate in test pipeline triage rotation and ensure pipeline failures are triaged promptly.
• Develop working knowledge of the entire GitLab application stack including tests at all levels. (Unit, Integration, and End-to-end).
• Groom and prune GitLab tests at all levels to ensure optimal coverage and effective deduplication.
• Collaborate with a Product Manager and with the wider product and development team to understand how new features should be tested and to contribute to automated tests for these new features.
• Collaborate with engineers to define and implement mechanisms to inject testing earlier into the software development process.
• Identify, share, and nurture the adoption of best practices in code health, testing, testability, and maintainability in collaboration with the wider Quality department. You should champion clean code and the concept of the test pyramid.
• Analyze complex software systems and collaborate with others to improve the overall design, testability, and quality.
• Strive for the fastest feedback possible. Test parallelization should be a top priority. You see distributed systems as a core challenge of good test automation infrastructure.
• Configure automated tests to execute reliably and efficiently in CI/CD environments.
• Track and communicate test results in a timely, effective, and automated manner.

Requirements

• You have a few years of professional experience developing in Ruby or working on a Ruby on Rails application
• You bring significant experience using Git and its command line
• You’re comfortable with Selenium-based test automation tools like Capybara
• You’ve got a working knowledge of Docker
• You’re interested in growing your knowledge and skills in Test Environment Provisioning and Configuring using technologies like Terraform, Ansible, Kubernetes, GCP, or AWS
• You have experience with Continuous Integration systems (e.g., Jenkins, Travis, GitLab)
• Our values of collaboration, results, efficiency, diversity, iteration, and transparency resonate with you
• You’ll thrive in an environment where self-learning and self-service is encouraged and instilled as a part of our culture
• Ability to use GitLab

Levels

• Intermediate
• Senior
• Staff

Intermediate

3 or more years of software engineering experience in Test Automation, Test Tooling and Infrastructure, or Development Deployment Operations.

Job Grade

The Software Engineer in Test is a grade 6.

Responsibilities

The Software Engineer in Test responsibilities have been documented under Intermediate Technical Competencies in our Career development page.

Senior

7 or more years of software engineering experience in Test Automation, Test Tooling and Infrastructure, or Development Deployment Operations.

Job Grade

The Senior Software Engineer in Test is a grade 7.

Responsibilities

The Senior Software Engineer in Test responsibilities have been documented under Senior Technical Competencies in our Career development page.

Staff

10 or more years of software engineering experience in Test Automation, Test Tooling and Infrastructure, or Development Deployment Operations.

Job Grade

The Staff Software Engineer in Test is a grade 8.

Responsibilities

The Staff Software Engineer in Test responsibilities have been documented under Staff Technical Competencies in our Career development page.

Career Ladder

The next step for both individual contributors and managers of people is to move to the Quality Engineering Leadership job family.

Performance Indicators

Software Engineers in Test have the following job-family performance indicators.

• Average CE/EE master end-to-end test suite execution duration per month
• Ratio of quarantine vs total end-to-end tests in master per month
• Successful vs failed CE/EE master pipelines per month
• New issue first triage SLO

Hiring Process

Candidates for this position can expect the hiring process to follow the order below. Please keep in mind that candidates can be declined from the position at any stage of the process. As a result an interview can be canceled at any time even if the interviews are very close (e.g. a few hours apart).

To learn more about someone who may be conducting the interview, find their job title on our team page.

• Candidates will complete a technical assessment when they apply. Sometimes this will be shared by our Talent Acquisiton team after an application is made.
• Qualified candidates will be invited to schedule a 30 minute screening call with our Talent Acquisiton team.
• Next, candidates will be invited to schedule a 45 minute first interview with the Hiring Manager for the team you are interviewing for. Once the interview is completed, there may be occasions where the interviewer believes you are a better match for another team we are hiring for. In this instance, we will ask you to meet another Hiring Manager as part of the process.
• Next, candidates will then be invited to schedule a 1 hour peer interview with a Software Engineer in Test in the Quality department.
• Next, candidates will then be invited to schedule a 1 hour technical interview with a Senior Software Engineer in Test. This will be booked for a date that is around 5-7 business days into the future. This is done in order to give them time to complete the asynchronous portion of the technical interview.
• Finally, candidates will be invited to schedule a 45 minute interview with the Head of Quality.
• Successful candidates will subsequently be made an offer via email.

Additional details about our process can be found on our hiring page.

Compensation Calculator

About GitLab

GitLab Inc. is a company based on the GitLab open-source project. GitLab is a community project to which over 2,200 people worldwide have contributed. We are an active participant in this community, trying to serve its needs and lead by example. We have one vision: everyone can contribute to all digital content, and our mission is to change all creative work from read-only to read-write so that everyone can contribute.

We value results, transparency, sharing, freedom, efficiency, self-learning, frugality, collaboration, directness, kindness, diversity, inclusion and belonging, boring solutions, and quirkiness. If these values match your personality, work ethic, and personal goals, we encourage you to visit our primer to learn more. Open source is our culture, our way of life, our story, and what makes us truly unique.

Top 10 Reasons to Work for GitLab:

1. Mission: Everyone can contribute
2. Results: Fast growth, ambitious vision
3. Flexible Work Hours: Plan your day so you are there for other people & have time for personal interests
4. Transparency: Over 2,000 webpages in GitLab handbook, GitLab Unfiltered YouTube channel
5. Iteration: Empower people to be effective & have an impact, Merge Request rate, We dogfood our own product, Directly responsible individuals
6. Diversity, Inclusion & Belonging: A focus on gender parity, Team Member Resource Groups, other initiatives
7. Collaboration: Kindness, saying thanks, intentionally organize informal communication, no ego
8. Total Rewards: Competitive market rates for compensation, Equity compensation, global benefits (inclusive of office equipment)
9. Work/Life Harmony: Flexible workday, Family and Friends days
10. Remote Done Right: One of the world's largest all-remote companies, prolific inventor of remote best practices

See our culture page for more!