QA Automation Test Engineer with Python Dev Experience

Software Guidance & Assistance, Inc., (SGA), is searching for a QA Automation Test Engineer with Python Development expertise to help build a cloud-based QA Automation framework for UI testing, backend data validation, performance testing, etc. This is a contractor position with one of our premier financial services clients in mid-town Manhattan, NYC. The firm is adopting a hybrid office/work-from-home model and hence you will be expected to report to the office in Midtown, New York 2-3 days/week . COVID-19 vaccination is mandatory for this position (subject to accommodation for health and religious reasons). Responsibilities:

• Collaborate to shape the future of our software quality and testing architecture/frameworks
• Raise the bar on our software delivery through automated performance and functional checks
• Organize with end users, business analysts, and other architects and developers following a scrum methodology
• Develop, maintain, and enhance new and existing test scripts for use by our QA teams
• Collaborate in standardizing the testing processes including technology selection for our automated frameworks, plan and coordinate all cycles of testing, including functional-level system tests and business scenario-based testing, to ensure proper test coverage while mitigating redundancy where possible
• Under minimum or no supervision, carry out procedures and tests to ensure that our application and services meet standards and end-user expectations
• Primary responsibilities estimated percentage allocation
  • Relationship Building: 20% test planning/strategy and brainstorming with developers end users
  • Manual testing and test case execution: 50%
  • Automation development and execution: 30%

• Strong experience testing web-based and desktop applications as well as data-drive testing and relatively sound knowledge in automation technologies
• Strong general-purpose Python coding experience intermediate to senior (e.g. pandas, profiling, regex, collections, exception handling, introspection, advanced data structures, others).
• Strong OOP and testing framework development experience.
• 5+ years of hands of software development applied to automated testing experience in various projects/teams/domains such as Web, API and Batch systems .
• Experience in both front end, middle tier and backend testing automation
• Strong experience with open-source technologies
• Demonstrated experience in integrating automated tests with test management and reporting repositories, including defect tracking and requirements management tools
• Deep understanding of database/backend testing,
• Strong knowledge of SQL, including transaction processing concepts, and large-scale dataset manipulation for test initialization
• Excellent communication skills (verbal and written), presentation, client management skills required
• Forensic attention to detail
• Experience in Agile/Scrum development model
• Good understanding of CI/CD concepts, tools and best practices.

• For functional test automation, strong technical knowledge of open source test automation technologies and test techniques for browser-based applications:
  • Deep understanding of document object model (DOM) and variety of DOM parsing techniques s
  • Strong experience in analyzing and defining automation feasible content for application (i.e. identifying applications where test automation may not be feasible or cost-effective)
  • Conversant with xpath and CSS selectors
  • Good understanding of services (example: REST ), JSON and XML data formats
  • Strong knowledge of building tests for RESTful APIs
  • Experience with automated verification techniques ( model-based verification )
  • Experience with or understanding of test case and test input generators, including combinatorial tools
  • Demonstrated experience mapping browser UIs to business domain concepts to enable high-level keyword testing
  • Intermediate to senior level understanding of HTML5/CSS3
  • Intermediate level understanding of browser event model
• For performance testing:
  • Strong understanding of performance and services testing concepts/tools such as JMeter/Load runner/Soap UI .
  • Strong understanding of performance testing concepts , specifically:
    • Throughput, response time, latency, resource consumption, response time distribution
    • workload composition, single-factor and multi-factor sensitivity testing
  • Understanding of web server and load balancer connection management and application-layer session management
  • Ability to write multi-threaded python code for performance test drivers
  • Ability to read/interpret log trace from Nginx, ELK stack and Apache servers

• Working experience as developer/programmer
• Experience in AWS technologies
• Working experience in Jenkins or other similar tools preferred
• Scripting in Linux environment is a plus
• Other: Kendo UI, JQuery, Django, Confluent/Elastic Search, ReactJS/ReduxJS.
• Experience working in financial services companies, such as asset managers, hedge funds and/or broker/dealers)