Available Position (Company name withheld)

Do you want to help scientists make breakthroughs, doctors save lives, and historians learn from our past? Join our small, fully-remote software development team that builds tools to connect scholars of all disciplines with the peer-reviewed journal articles that advance their research. 

Third Iron's industry-leading software services BrowZine and LibKey are used by millions of students, doctors, industry researchers, and scientists affiliated with over 2,000 libraries at universities, hospitals, corporations, and government departments in over 35 countries, including places like Stanford University, Mayo Clinic, NHS England, and University of Hong Kong.

In a refreshing change from advertising-dependent tech companies or those who sell user data, we instead have a straightforward business-to-business model. We sell our subscription-based services to libraries that may be used by anyone affiliated with them. We do not sell user data.  Our focus is on building the best software to enable research that changes the world.

Your Role

As a Senior Quality Engineer, you will help lead our Quality Assurance approach, defining and improving our quality processes across all of our systems.  You will also lead the tooling and implementation of automated UI testing, as well as incorporating manual exploratory testing where appropriate.  

Products we are responsible for include web apps, a browser extension, internal web app tools, Javascript code that enhances other library tools, and some APIs used by external library technology groups.

Quality-focused teammates are fully integrated into the Software Development team. You attend our quick daily standup, our end-of-sprint demo day, retrospective, and requirements discussion meetings. 

Each of our systems already have an extensive suite of automated tests that are run on every commit in CI.  However, we are looking to improve our test suites with more UI automation, helping us capture precise reports of how our systems are performing to enable even stronger confidence that things are behaving as we intend, without undesired visual glitches or behavior regressions. 

What You Would Do at Third Iron

• Help develop and maintain quality processes for our software development team
• Monitor quality metrics, including deciding which metrics to monitor, and ignoring unhelpful metrics 
• Promote best practices in automation and testing strategy
• Design, develop, and maintain robust automated testing solutions across our UI layers for industry-leading SaaS applications (and a little API testing, too) 
• Execute testing of new features and ensure their smooth integration into production environments
• Help drive quality across the engineering organization

What We’re Looking For

• Experience with automation, ideally using either JavaScript, TypeScript, or NodeJS. We are currently evaluating Playwright
• Strong communication skills – since we are a fully-distributed remote team, clear, timely, and frequent communication is essential
• Interest in defining and refining the QA process
• Experience with source control, ideally git
• Self-motivation and comfort working independently, which we've found is important for remote working
• Interest in lifelong learning, including learning new technologies. We embrace the tools and techniques that help us build great software which lets us sleep soundly at night, with high confidence that our users are having a delightful experience and our servers are not catching fire
• Interest in AI.  We use AI tooling such as Cursor and Claude where we feel it helps the most, including assisting in code review and overcoming that initial activation energy and research to get a change started.  We keep humans in the loop for the important decisions though, including making plans and commitments, and choosing when and what to merge and deploy. We're curious how you see AI working into increasing and maintaining software quality
• Someone with many years of quality experience in an agile environment, either as a Software Development Engineer in Test (SDET), Release Engineer, or QA role involving web technologies. We care more about the quality of your work than the numbers of years
• People with U.S. work authorizations.  (We are looking for a full-time developer to join our team, so please, no software development firms looking to hire out contractors - we're interested in talking directly to QA engineers)

Bonus points if you're interested in...

• Assisting our top-notch customer support team to document and/or reproduce tricky bugs that they were unable to fully address for users
• Release management
• Accessibility testing, which has rapidly become an important compliance requirement for our customers
• Automated load testing

 

Working at Third Iron

Third Iron is a small company of 30 employees, and our growth and success have been fueled by the passionate, curious people who work here.

Understanding that work is just part of your life, Third Iron also provides benefits including health, dental, long-term disability, paid time-off, home-office stipend, and more. It's why most employees who work at Third Iron spend many years of their careers here.  You could, too!

Apply

To apply, fill out the job application, and please include anything that helps demonstrate how you would be a great teammate. Examples include links to your source control or StackOverflow profile, articles or presentations you’ve created, or even just reporting bugs on open source projects. Even a short paragraph describing how you've approached building or improving a test suite would be helpful. We're looking for something to help us learn how you contribute to a team that makes products for our many enterprise SaaS customers.