The Opportunity
Shorthand is a growing company that provides a digital publishing platform to many of the world’s best-known publishers, brands, not-for-profits, and universities. With customers on every continent (except Antarctica!), there’s never been a more exciting time to join Shorthand. Our company has the rare distinction in this era of money-burning startups of being both investor-backed and comfortably profitable.
We set a high bar for quality in our product and services, and as our platform has grown, we’re at the point where we need to grow our QA team further in order to maintain the high expectations that we set for ourselves.
The Role
We tend to do things a little differently at Shorthand. For one thing, we’re a small team that is distributed around the world. We’ll happily take applications from anywhere on the planet but with a few conditions: you must be fluent in English (both written and spoken) and you can be online during Eastern Australian working hours (preferably with a cross-over of at least 3-5 hours per day) to collaborate with the team.
This role reports to the VP of Engineering. You will work closely with the Senior QA Engineer &alongside designers, engineers and product managers responsible for delivering our product.
We are looking for someone who:
- Is passionate about testing and gains deep satisfaction from helping to make products better.
- Has an extremely high bar for quality, knows when to advocate for quality-related issues.
- Has great communication skills and can clearly communicate ideas.
- Can appropriately adapt any testing that they perform to be context relevant.
- Has prior experience with manually testing web applications.
- Is thorough and detail-oriented.
- Can learn fast.
- Enjoys structure.
- Is able to triage a competing set of priorities to obtain an optimal outcome.
- Has experience working in a small business or startup environment.
- Preferably has experience collaborating with diverse, geographically-dispersed teams.
Core Responsibilities:
- Become an active part of the QA team within Shorthand.
- Become an expert in the use of Shorthand.
- Work with the Senior QA Engineer to help grow (and identify areas for additional growth for) all testing-related activities, in addition to identifying any relevant process-related improvements (e.g., through the creation of new references or utilising specific tools).
- Analyse new features for risks, in order to help minimise the number of new bugs.
- Perform functional, integration, regression, post-deployment verification testing.
- Perform cross-browser and cross-device testing.
- Clearly report issues (bugs and UI/UX problems) found in our products, including steps to reproduce those issues.
- Present on testing-related subjects at All Hands and other meetings.
- Assist with creating and updating test documentation and testing-related references that can be followed by you and other members of the team.
- Communicate with the customer support team and customers to suggest temporary solutions to issues.
Qualifications:
- A minimum of 3 years of experience in a manual QA Engineer role or similar.
- General experience in configuring and using testing-related tools.
- Experience with GitHub Issues is desirable.
- A relevant university qualification is a bonus.
- Experience with remote work.
Personality Attributes:
- Loves creative writing, journalism, photography or graphic design.
- You possess a high level of intellectual curiosity and enjoy the discovery process.
- You enjoy developing your testing skills further and enjoy reading and/or blogging about testing in your own time.
- You are a proactive self-starter, who does not need to be told what to do and will be resourceful in order to find solutions to any challenge.
- You thrive in a fast-paced and demanding environment.
- You are collaborative and enjoy working directly with other team members.
- You gain satisfaction from finding problems and happiness when those problems are properly solved.
- You are organised and enjoy structure.