Quality Engineering Lead

Imagine a world where you deploy on a Friday afternoon and then go do whatever it is you normally do (in our case is usually having a beer or 2 with our colleagues) without stress. That's the world we want to live in. And of course, we are not talking about shipping on Fridays for the sake of it. We are talking about shipping with confidence in general, even if it has to be a Friday :P

We are investing more and more in Quality Engineering (QE) here at Pleo. Recently, we build a tool - Demolicious - that can create fake customers with realistic data for demos and exploratory testing. Before Demolicious, it would take most of a day setting up a realistic customer, so people were demoing and testing using the same customers, causing all kinds of problems.

Currently, we work on improving our metrics to help us focus our efforts. Note, this is a QE team, not a Quality Assurance (QA). So what we want to know is what tools we need to build or improve and where to focus our coaching - not where to jump in and test stuff.

As a Quality Engineering Lead, your main goal is to help our teams reach those stress-free deploys. It will be up to you and the rest of the QE team to define how you achieve that. One of the biggest challenges in this role will be figuring out the best way to get there. How will you find the right areas to focus on? How will you convince the teams to adopt certain practices? How will you support them in adopting those practices? How can we do it in a way that increases productivity rather than slowing them down?

As a manager, we expect you to lead with compassion and kindness when someone makes mistakes and take the time to encourage good habits. We expect you to work with the team and help them grow.

Finally, we have the everyday management of the team. We trust each team to choose their preferred ways of working, so it will be up to you and the team to figure out how to best achieve your goals. We expect you to care about this process and continually improve it.

If you've been nodding with excitement while reading all these, we'd like to meet you :)

What we expect from you:

• Experience with people management in software engineering.
• A good understanding of metrics, what it will take for a quality team to be data-driven, and how to use those metrics to help and guide other teams.
• Knowledge about quality practices and concepts for modern software systems (i.e quality assistance, continuous delivery, microservices architecture).
• Hands-on programming experience in at least one, preferably several, different modern languages (e.g. Typescript, Kotlin, Scala).

You will thrive in this role if you:

• Have successfully lead a remote and distributed software team in the past.
• Care about people and helping them grow.
• Have successfully managed larger projects from investigating feasibility all the way to completion.
• Are passionate about the craft of software development, especially the part that ensures high quality.
• Knows how to changes others ways of working without ordering them to do so.
• Enjoy the success of others, your success is the high quality of other teams.

Your colleagues say about you:

• Inspires and motivates others.
• Challenges the status quo, and provide good arguments why.
• Easy to work with and a person they would also enjoy having a coffee with (virtual or not).
• Has a solid track in Software Engineering.
• Listens to feedback but is strong enough to drive your own vision.

Your mom says that you:

• Lead the other kids to build huge lego constructions.
• You always asked why
• Always come up with the most efficient route to do your errands.
• You know way too much about everything.
• Probably work in IT (moms).

Show me the benefits!

• Your own Pleo card (no more out-of-pocket spending)
• Ability to work remotely (anywhere between east coast of the Americas to European timezones)...
• ...or onsite if you want to (Copenhagen, London, Berlin, Stockholm, Madrid)
• Quarterly trips to somewhere for team camps (both company-wide ones and team-specific ones). The next one will be in September in Costa Brava, Spain. If the Covid-gods wills it!
• Investment in learning & developing (just check with your team for what's reasonable, we don't have set budgets).

And here are some other nice gestures that we do

• Catered lunch in our HQ and London offices when you're here
• 25 days holidays (annual)
• Loads of weird and wonderful niche communities to join in the company (we're talking guerrilla gardening, liquids tasting, the Pleo band, learning to code initiatives, beer brewing, skiing, that type of thing)
• Wild enthusiasm and encouragement from us if you want to host MeetUps, events, etc - we'll help (venue, food, etc)