Staff SDET

Job Title: Staff SDET

Alkami is the digital sales and service platform provider for U.S. banks and credit unions. Our unified Platform integrates onboarding, digital banking, and data and marketing—each solution can stand alone, but together they deliver more—to help institutions onboard, engage, and grow relationships. As the future shifts toward Anticipatory Banking, we help data-informed bankers meet the moment with technology that drives action.

Founded in 2009, we continue to be recognized for our intentional culture and tremendous growth (Best Place to Work in Fintech; Best & Brightest to Work For Nationally; and Comparably’s Best Company Culture, Best Career Growth, Best Engineering Team, and Best Places to Work in Dallas, among others). We’re building a culture where each Alkamist can perform to their highest potential, and we’re always on the lookout for the best and brightest minds. If you’re ready to experience the power of alchemy - transforming the ordinary into the extraordinary - come join one of the fastest growing SaaS companies in the U.S.

As a remote-first company, most of our positions can be remote in the US, except for key roles, which will be indicated in the Job Title.

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Role Overview

The Staff SDET role is responsible for working as an individual contributor and quality engineering leader within a software development scrum team. In this role, the Senior SDET will be guiding and collaborating with a select group of SDETs and Test Engineers. This role will encompass the entire spectrum of test automation and white-box testing.

Essential Duties & Responsibilities

• Build and maintain automated test suites for the full tech stack including UI, API, Microservices, and Database.
• Guide SDETs at least in one functional area to enhance, optimize, and stabilize the automated test suites.
• Contribute tool analysis, create proof of concept models, and make recommendations to support the tools selection process.
• Implement coding guidelines, peer reviews, git workflow, process workflow, quality gates, CI/CD process, etc based on defined best practices.
• Actively participate in reviews (walkthroughs) of technical specifications and program code with architects & developers, communicating design, requirements, feature set, functionality, and limitations of systems/applications to the team.
• Promote Quality engineering processes, practices, and standards both within and across teams.
• Perform functional/ regression tests, analyze automated test results, and report defects in a timely and efficient manner to track them to closure.
• Integrate automated tests into the CI/CD pipeline to support continuous testing and deployment.
• Participate in all the Agile ceremonies for mentee teams (sprint grooming, planning, demos, retros).
• Involvement with Go/No Go and other Release Meetings.
• Collaborate with the agile squad and cross-functional teams to understand project requirements and application architecture.
• Design and document comprehensive test strategies, testing guidelines, standard operating procedures, utilities, and tooling to improve the efficiency of test automation.
• Triage customer issues, analyze production metrics, and provide root cause analysis to the engineers, and recommend system hardening measures.
• Provides guidance to SDETs and Associates and Seniors. Serves as a SME for multiple areas of the application and monitors the success of their mentees.
• Provides oversight over a small group of SDETs. Ensures they are following SOP and adhering to design and coding guidelines.
• Lead the maintenance of the test environments, test data creations, ensuring they are consistent with staging/production configurations.

Recommended Experience & Education

• Minimum Years of Experience: Typically requires a minimum of 8 years of related experience; or 6 years and an advanced degree.
• Education Level: Bachelor’s degree in engineering, CS, physics, math, statistics, or another related field or equivalent work experience

Knowledge, Skills, & Qualifications

• Proficient in coding and extensive implementation of object-oriented programming, data structures, design patterns, etc, in one or more programming languages such as C#, Java, Python, JS, or similar. Familiar with Shell scripting, and Powershell scripting.
• Expert in various full stack - open source testing tools such as Selenium/ Cypress/ Playwright for Web testing, Appium/ Espresso for Mobile testing and RestAssured/ HttpClient for API testing.
• Ability to build, maintain and enhance test automation framework using industry best practice such as page-object model, data-driven framework, behavioral driven development, etc using testing framework such as JUnit, NUnit, TestNg, Pytest or Cucumber.
• Experience in setting up Git workflow (eg: Bitbucket, Gitlab), build automation tools (Gradle, Maven, Nuget etc), and artifact management using tools like JFrog, Proget, etc.
• Experience in enabling automated test execution on cloud devices (Saucelabs/ Browserstack) using various CI/CD tools such as Gitlab, Github, Jenkins, Bamboo, TeamCity, CircleCI, etc.
• Expert in building test strategies and test plans with a variety of test types such as Smoke, Functional, Regression testing, etc. using various test case optimization techniques.
• Working knowledge of Agile/DevOps development methodologies such as Scrum and Kanban.
• Working knowledge of relational databases (eg: SQL Server, Postgres) and non-relational databases (eg: MongoDB, DynamoDB). Ability to write complex queries including Joins, Aggregate functions, etc. Analyze the system's data architecture, store procedures, database monitors, database profilers, etc. for improvements.
• Exposure to White Box Testing techniques (Unit & Integration tests), including the use of tools like SonarQube, JaCoCO, etc. Assisting in defining the automated checks on code quality and coverage.
• Knowledge of performance testing practices using tools like JMeter, Gatling, etc.
• Knowledge of different API architectures such as REST, GraphQL, Webhooks, WCF, and gRPC protocols. UI architectures /concepts such as Micro frontend, single page applications etc.
• Well-versed in testing different layers in Microservice architecture, Event-driven/messaging architecture (Kafka, SQS), Kubernetes platform, and Service virtualization to improve testability.
• Ability to design and improve test workflows and processes.
• Experience in creating quality metrics, and analyzing metrics to understand trends and risks.
• Excellent collaboration skills. Able to communicate highly technical issues and concepts to technical, non-technical, and leadership audiences by tailoring the message accordingly. Can act as an advocate for quality initiatives, and can achieve buy-in from diverse viewpoints by demonstrating value.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills
• Ability to pull logs from different environments (Production, Staging, Integrated environments) and resolve difficult to reproduce scenarios. Must be comfortable with PagerDuty for Production errors and troubleshooting for owned areas as well as assisting other SDETs.

Preferred Qualifications

• Master’s degree in engineering, technology or related field
• Experience working with B2B2C SaaS offerings in the FinTech industry
• Experience building and deploying applications on Amazon Web Services

Physical Demands

• Ability to lift a minimum of 5 pounds to a maximum of 10 pounds unassisted
• Ability to stand, sit, stoop, walk, stretch, reach, and use full range of body motions
• Manual dexterity as required for specific equipment

Key Skills/Competency

• Staff SDET
• Test Automation
• White-box Testing
• API Testing
• Microservices
• CI/CD
• Agile Methodologies
• Quality Engineering
• Programming Languages (Java, Python, C#)
• Test Frameworks