Software Developer In Test

📋 Description

• • Ashby Inc. is seeking a highly technical and hands-on Software Developer in Test (SDET) to join our foundational QA team, reporting directly to the QA Lead. This role is pivotal in enhancing the systems that underpin our testing processes, enabling our engineering teams to move with speed and confidence as our product evolves and our company grows. We believe quality is not an afterthought but an integral part of the system, built in from the start. Our QA philosophy is centered on creating robust, scalable infrastructure that provides fast, actionable feedback, fostering trust among engineers and proactively identifying user-impacting issues.
• • As an SDET at Ashby, you will not be a gatekeeper or a manual test executor. Instead, you will be instrumental in building and refining the tools and frameworks that empower our engineers to maintain high quality standards. Your primary focus will be on designing and implementing systems that engineers want to use, debugging and simplifying existing processes, and writing and maintaining end-to-end tests. You will collaborate closely with engineers to establish efficient, high-confidence feedback loops, particularly in complex and rapidly developing areas of our product.
• • While the core of your work will involve building and improving test infrastructure, Ashby is a small, collaborative team. This means that during busy periods, you will be expected to roll up your sleeves and contribute to manual testing efforts alongside your colleagues. This shared responsibility ensures that everyone understands the full quality lifecycle and contributes to our collective success.
• • You will be a key member of our nascent SDET group, contributing significantly to the development of our quality engineering practices. Your daily activities will involve writing code to build test frameworks, optimize test execution speed by orders of magnitude, and troubleshoot and resolve flaky tests that impede team velocity. A critical aspect of this role is bringing product intuition to your work, understanding user needs, identifying potential edge cases, and guiding engineers towards the most impactful tests rather than simply increasing test volume.
• • The ultimate goal is to build systems that provide leverage, ensuring that we are testing what truly matters. We measure success not by the number of test cases, but by the time saved, risks mitigated, and overall system reliability achieved. Your contributions will directly translate into tangible improvements in our product's stability and our engineering team's efficiency.
• • Ashby's engineering culture emphasizes ownership and continuous improvement. We encourage you to explore our Operating Principles and Blog to gain a deeper understanding of our approach to building software and fostering quality. You will play a crucial role in translating this vision into practical tooling and workflows that our team relies on daily.
• • In your first two months, you will be writing code within your first week, paired with a team member to accelerate your understanding of our product, systems, and tooling. By the end of your first month, you will have delivered an improvement to our test suite's reliability or speed. By the end of your second month, you will have conceptualized and built a new test tool, framework, or visibility layer, and successfully onboarded another team member to its usage.
• • Our technology stack includes TypeScript (frontend & backend), React, SASS modules and Stitches, Apollo GraphQL, Node.js, Postgres, and Redis. Experience with TypeScript and Playwright is highly desirable for this role.
• • This is an opportunity to shape the future of quality engineering at Ashby, working in a remote-first environment across North America. You will be empowered to make significant technical contributions and directly impact the velocity and quality of our engineering organization.