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Delivering fast, deep, and tough-minded journalism, STAT takes readers inside science labs and hospitals, biotech boardrooms and political backrooms. We publish breaking news, richly reported feature stories, investigative projects, and multimedia presentations.
STAT QA/Test Automation Engineer — Contract
STAT, a national health and medicine publication produced by Boston Globe Media, is focused on finding and telling compelling stories about health, medicine, and scientific discovery. We tell our stories from the places that matter to our readers — research labs, hospitals, executive suites, and political campaigns.
We are looking for a contract/freelance web application QA and test automation engineer with proven experience writing automated tests for web-based e-commerce workflows. In this role, you’ll work closely with the STAT’s lead engineer in order to develop a front-end test automation framework that our engineering team can eventually bring in house and further build on.
The engineer would help us automate key functional testing flows that are currently completely manual (and very time-consuming). We are initially wanting to automate a full end-to-end test of our front-end subscription workflow (see: https://www.statnews.com/subscribe/) from the perspective of an end-user browser client, using an appropriate test framework that integrates with Headless Chrome browser technology.
This position is a contract or hourly/freelance position and does not include benefits. Rates and deadlines are negotiable. Remote work is allowed, though we’d be happy to have you join us at our downtown Boston headquarters for periodical in-person check-ins, if you live in the greater Boston area. This is a direct contract hire posting. No recruiters at this time, please.
You have:
- Advanced experience working with any modern open-source Node/JS-based test automation framework, such as: Headless Chrome, Nightwatch, Karma, Jasmine, Mocha, Chai, etc.
- The initial part of this contract will be you helping us decide which framework(s) we need to incorporate given our use cases (additional technical requirements to be provided prior to start of the engagement).
- Experience with screenshot-taking frameworks for automating the visual regression test process (e.g. Spectre).
- Proven JavaScript programming expertise. Ideally, you will have experience with front-end JS programming with advanced knowledge of the browser/DOM architecture, in addition to backend JS architecture as implemented within the Node JS environment.
- Prior experience writing unit and functional tests.
- Working knowledge of continuous integration software such as Jenkins, Travis, etc.
- Strong problem-solving and debugging abilities.
- Previous experience automating tests for e-commerce checkout and product purchasing workflows.
- Web form test automation experience.
Bonus points if you have experience working with any of the following:
- Knowledge of modern ES6 JavaScript syntax and features.
- Front-end performance optimization on high-traffic websites.
- Front-end performance benchmarking.
You will:
- Work closely with STAT’s lead engineer to deliver on well-defined project milestones.
- Be assigned access to a private GitHub repository and submit each milestone (i.e. JavaScript source code) as pull requests to be reviewed and signed off on by the lead engineer.
- Iterate on each project deliverable with the lead engineer until review feedback is addressed and complete.
- Manage project dependencies and builds using npm and Webpack.
- Install a LAMP stack running on Vagrant and VirtualBox for running our local WordPress development environment.
- This is the web app environment you will be targeting your frontend tests scripts to.
Applicants can send their resume to corey.taylor@statnews.com along with some descriptions of, or links to, examples of past work. We will be in touch as soon as possible to talk about next steps.
About Boston Globe Media
Boston Globe Media is just that — a media company. We are not a newspaper business, but a company whose entire mission is to change the newspaper business. We are an aggressive, entrepreneurial-minded digital operation with a range of highly trafficked platforms like BostonGlobe.com, Boston.com, and StatNews.com at our disposal. Those platforms are the future of media in a town whose voice is like no other.
Boston Globe Media is an equal employment opportunity employer, and does not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, gender, sexual orientation, marital status, age, disability, national origin, citizenship or any other protected characteristic. Boston Globe Media is committed to diversity in its most inclusive sense.