The company
silverorange is a design and development agency based in Canada. Within the next 6 months, our team will grow from 22 to 25 people. When pursuing work, we focus on interesting and meaningful projects. Over our 21 years as a company, we’ve worked with well-known technology organizations like Duolingo and Mozilla, not-for-profit organizations working in areas including arts funding and
affordable internet access for low-income families, and with world-renowned doctors training other doctors through online education.
While we’re proud of the fantastic products we’ve built in partnership with our clients, we’re equally invested in the process behind them. We are committed to fostering a team focused as much on quality of life, openness, empathy, and a supportive work environment as it is on building great user-focused systems.
The position
We’re looking for an intermediate Software Automation Specialist to join our team in order to help us improve our testing and QA infrastructure. This role is frequently known as Software Development Engineer in Test (SDET). As an applicant, you have a background in software development, and a passion for code quality and QA automation. We expect some level of prior professional experience in this role, and will provide mentoring, support, and learning opportunities to help you expand your skills.
Applications will be accepted until March 31, 2021, at which point we’ll be in touch with anyone who has applied. This position is available immediately and we will work with you to get you started as soon as possible.
Growth & ownership
Our team is co-operative and will help you learn and expand your skills via mentoring, team-wide support, and learning opportunities. All members of the team are encouraged and given space to grow as individual contributors, and have ongoing opportunities in project and team leadership. We favour applicants with a strong sense of ownership over their own work, who are excited to learn and contribute, over other metrics like years of experience.
We’re excited to hear your fresh ideas and approach. We have decades of collective experience, and we all continue to become better at what we do by both teaching and learning from each other. Add your voice to our mix.
Opportunity for employee ownership is a fundamental part of silverorange (non-founders currently own more than a third of the company) and we’re currently working on new ways to transfer even more ownership to employees.
Inclusion & diversity
People with different backgrounds and experiences make us stronger, and we’re always looking for ways to improve. Our team is getting more diverse across many dimensions of diversity, but we’re still missing perspectives that could make our work better. We highly encourage people from traditionally underrepresented groups in our industry to apply—we’d love to hear from you.
Responsibilities
- Automating testing and code quality infrastructure.
- Writing clear, concise, and comprehensive testing plans and test cases.
- Advocating for quality and testability in our development process.
- Collaborating with our development team to design, implement, maintain, and improve our testing infrastructure and environments.
- Working as part of our development team to write end-to-end, integration, and unit tests for the products we support.
- Context switching between multiple client projects on an ongoing basis.
Requirements
- Be a resident of, and available to work from Canada.
- Be able to quickly learn and understand new systems.
- Have a good understanding of software test automation fundamentals.
- Ongoing knowledge of industry best-practices around QA and automation.
- Programming experience in modern JavaScript platforms like Express and React.
- Experience with automated testing. Experience with the following tools is an advantage, but not a requirement: Jenkins, Cypress, Jest, XCtest, JUnit, Bitrise
- Be able to communicate clearly with clients and co-workers across multiple time zones. Several of our key clients are in California and we have team members in PEI, Nova Scotia, Quebec, Ontario, Alberta, BC, and Ecuador.
While not required, if you have any of the following skills let us know:
- Know how to write SQL (we use PostgreSQL).
- iOS (Objective-C) or Android (Kotlin) app development.
- Source code version control systems. We use Git and GitHub.
- Front-end Web development including markup, CSS, and JavaScript.
- TypeScript language experience.
Remote working is just as good as local
Our team has been remote-friendly for 20 years, and remote-first for the last 6. We continue to improve our approach to having a dispersed team. Due to COVID-19 this position will start as full-time remote regardless of location, though you are welcome to work from our lovely offices in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, Canada once they are re-opened.
Almost half of our team is full-time remote and 95% of our clients are remote. You’ll need to be comfortable working with remote clients and co-workers regardless of your location.
Typically all employees spend at least one week each year working from our Charlottetown office so plan on visiting PEI semi-regularly once travel is considered safer.
Though you may be working remotely, you’ll be an active member of a great small but growing team, both here at silverorange and with our clients. Regular voice or video communication will help keep you in touch with the smart people with whom you’ll be working.
Benefits & compensation
- Flexible work days, approached collaboratively with you to allow for the realities of appointments, family minding, and your everyday life.
- 3 weeks of paid vacation, on top of 9 paid days of civic holidays, and 3 weeks of paid company-wide shut down.
- Generous health and dental coverage, with 100% of premium covered by silverorange.
- New computer hardware every 3 years, and other tools as needed.
- Yearly company-wide bonuses based on overall company success, plus ownership opportunities and dividends for long-term employees.
- Salary starting at CAD $58-62,000 per year depending on experience, with opportunities and expectation of rapid career and compensation growth.
- Additional remote worker stipend of CAD $3,000 per year and a wellness stipend of $500 per year.
How to apply
Email us at
slice@silverorange.com with the subject line “Software Automation Specialist”, a brief overview of your qualifications, links to relevant examples of recent work (GitHub or an equivalent profile is a great place to start), and an explanation of why you’d be great for the job. Tell us about an interesting project you’ve worked on or helped ship. We value individuality and variety, so make sure to tell us what you’re all about. If you have an online presence that you’re comfortable sharing—such as a blog, Twitter, etc—send it along.