Hiscox

Job Type:

Permanent

Build a brilliant future with Hiscox

Position: SDET

Reporting to: Lead SDET

Location: Lisbon

Type: Permanent

Band: 2

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.

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 automated testing frameworks to ensure the quality of our web applications, APIs and data platforms. This will involve working closely with the software engineers and product owners in understanding, defining and testing of the application. You will be the quality champion and driving quality by design within the squad. You will ensure our test suites give appropriate coverage to reduce the chance of regression defects 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 APIs, data platforms 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 with C# testing framework.
• Experience with web application testing using tools such as Playwright.
• Experience with the API testing using RestSharp
• 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

• Experience building tests into Azure DevOps pipelines.
• Exposure to Docker / Familiarity of containerization would be advantageous
• Experience performance and volume testing APIs and Web applications using tools like LoadUI (or similar).
• Particular understanding of the Azure cloud.

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, software development practices and have the ability to apply this knowledge in learning new tools.

Our technology platforms include web applications developed in C# interacting with backend services (APIs) and backed by Microsoft SQL Server databases. We operate data platforms using Snowflake cloud data warehouse orchestrated with Python code and Prefect for ELT. We have a hybrid on-premises / Azure cloud infrastructure and are adopting a cloud first / provider agnostic approach.

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.

Why work here?

If you want to help build a brilliant future; work with amazing people; be part of a unique company culture; and, of course, enjoy great employee benefits that take care of your mental and physical wellbeing, come and join us.

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Work with amazing people and be part of a unique culture