Software Development Engineer in Test

Job Type:

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 passionate in applying technology to drive results and advocate for appropriate solutions.

We are looking for an enthusiastic and self-motivated individual to ensure quality is embedded into everything we do, ensuring that requirements are effectively converted to automated tests that guarantee our technologies conform with our expectations.

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 and avoids excessive amounts of code. 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 Software Development Engineer in Test to support our London Market Engineering team and immediately get involved in shaping the way we ensure quality across all of our technology platforms. 

The role

Within this role you will establish and maintain our automated testing frameworks to ensure the quality of our cloud data platform. This will involve working closely with the data engineers and data analysts in understanding, defining and testing of the data that is being held in the cloud data platform. You will be the quality champion and driving quality by design within data. You will ensure our test suites give appropriate coverage to reduce the chance of regression including tests of application performance under realistic loads. You will also ensure our disaster recovery and failover protocols are fully tested. In order to achieve this, you will have good understanding of key components of our underlying technologies.

As a technologist you will drive improvement of our testing landscape, evaluating and adopting new technologies as required. You will serve as part of the source of expertise and advocate for quality engineering across the London Market Tech team. You will guide cross-discipline squads and influence them to ensure that they build quality assurance and unit testing into their solutions from the ground-up. You will be a fierce proponent of requirements-driven testing.

What you’ll be doing

• Ensuring hands-on development of both testing frameworks and specific tests for data platform and web applications.
• Creating and working within a specialist quality engineering practice for the Hiscox London Market with a right tool for the job mentality; researching, evaluating and adopting new technologies.
• Focusing on speed of delivery and quality, with suitable pragmatism – ensuring your solutions are always “appropriate” and not overly complex or over-engineered.
• Enabling progression of projects from PoC to post-production stage.
• Communicating and presenting ideas to colleagues in all parts of the wider business.
• Working with offshore partner quality engineers – in India and Poland and onsite staff in London and York Hiscox offices.

Our must haves

• Sound understanding of testing methodologies including behaviour-driven testing, unit testing and data-driven testing.
• Ability to take an automation-first approach to quality engineering.
• Experience developing testing frameworks for data sciences.
• Hands-on experience with Python.
• Familiarity with the Python testing framework pytest and its behavioural extension pytest-bdd.
• Behaviour-driven testing of executable specifications e.g. using Gherkin.
• Sufficient SQL expertise to develop effective backend database tests.
• Good understanding of DevOps principals.
• Experience working in a truly agile style.
• Experience in working with version control tools like git.
• Experience with both cloud and on-premises solutions.
• Commercial savvy necessary to ensure work is prioritised and targeted appropriately.
• Good Team Player.
• Excellent Communication skills.

Our nice to haves

• Familiarity with Snowflake, Prefect and DBT.
• Experience building tests into Azure DevOps pipelines.
• Exposure to Docker / Familiarity of containerization would be advantageous.
• Particular understanding of the Azure/GCP cloud.
• Experience with big data.

Our technology

We operate in a diverse technical landscape and are looking for flexible SDETs who can adapt to and use many different tools. We would not expect any SDET to be familiar with the entire tech stack. Instead, we seek people with a good understanding of quality engineering, data structures and the ability to apply this knowledge in learning new tools.

We are working to build a cloud data platform to realise value from our data. That platform is based on Snowflake,  Azue Data Factory  for ELT and Prefect for orchestration all running on Microsoft Azure. Most platform code is written in SQL or Python. We are beginning to pull this together using dbt.

We prepare data for use by analysts working with a variety of tools – Tableau, Dataiku, Python, and even Excel.

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. We handle schema migration using Flyway.

Diversity and flexible working at Hiscox

At Hiscox we care about our people. We hire the best people for the job and we’re 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 doesn’t 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.

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