We are looking for a motivated and detail-oriented Junior QA Engineer to join our growing Quality Assurance team. This is an excellent opportunity for someone who enjoys technology, problem-solving, and ensuring software meets the highest standards of quality. As a Junior QA Engineer, you will work closely with Engineering, Product, and Data teams to validate new features, identify defects, and improve the overall quality of our software platforms. You’ll gain hands-on experience testing websites, APIs, search systems, and large datasets while helping deliver reliable, scalable solutions to our customers. If you’re naturally curious, enjoy digging into complex problems, and take pride in producing high-quality work, we’d love to hear from you.
What You'll Do
- Perform manual and automated testing to ensure the quality of production releases.
- Test websites, APIs, search engines, and backend data to ensure accuracy and reliability.
- Perform data quality validation against large databases and search indexes.
- Develop and execute test plans, test cases, regression tests, and user scenarios.
- Assist in creating and maintaining automated test suites.
- Collaborate with developers to improve unit testing and overall software quality.
- Identify, document, reproduce, and help prioritize software defects.
- Apply both analytical and creative thinking to uncover edge cases and potential issues.
- Develop a strong understanding of our products, business rules, and technical architecture.
- Continuously learn new technologies, tools, and testing methodologies.
- Proactively suggest improvements to testing processes, automation, and product quality.
- Communicate effectively with developers, product managers, and other stakeholders throughout the software development lifecycle.
Key Responsibilities
- Operate and tune HDFS, YARN, Hive, and Spark across both clusters, including a mixed-version estate: one cluster runs an older HDP-era stack with Spark 2.x and a legacy Python driver environment; the other has recently been upgraded to a modern Hive release. Managing that version skew — and the compatibility traps it creates for job authors — is part of the role.
- Own gateway host capacity. Monitor and set limits on concurrent worker pools, multiprocessing fan-outs, and Spark drivers so a single workload cannot starve the box. Push back on resource requests that the available evidence doesn’t actually support.
- Run the Hive Metastore and HiveServer2, including JVM sizing and OOM exposure. Diagnose transient failures such as partition-add serialization errors and thrift session rejections.
- Administer the clusters through Ambari: service configs, alerts, rolling restarts, and version upgrades.
- Handle capacity planning, HDFS quotas, and data retention. Every dataset we generate needs a documented retention and cleanup story, and you’ll help enforce that on the storage side.
- Partner with the data engineering team, which orchestrates pipelines with Apache Airflow on AWS MWAA. Most remote work reaches the clusters over SSH from the gateways, so you’ll be the escalation point when a pipeline task fails for infrastructure reasons rather than logic reasons.
- Manage access control, SSH key hygiene, and service accounts across gateways and cluster nodes.
- Build the monitoring and alerting we’re missing — host load, per-tenant resource consumption, metastore health, and early warning before a gateway becomes unresponsive.
Required Qualifications & Skills
- Strong attention to detail with a passion for delivering high-quality software.
- Understanding of software testing principles and quality assurance methodologies.
- Experience testing web applications, APIs, or data-driven systems through coursework, internships, or professional experience.
- Familiarity with responsive web testing across desktop, tablet, and mobile devices.
- Basic understanding of SQL and the ability to write database queries for validation.
- Knowledge of modern web technologies, including:
- HTML
- CSS
- HTTP/HTTPS
- Strong analytical, organizational, and problem-solving skills.
- Excellent written and verbal communication skills.
- Ability to work both independently and collaboratively in a fast-paced Agile environment.
- A willingness to learn and continuously improve.
Preferred Skills
- Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Software Engineering, or a related field (preferred but not required).
- Experience with test automation tools such as:
- Selenium
- NUnit
- Apiary or similar automation frameworks.
- Experience testing high-volume APIs, enterprise applications, search platforms, or large-scale databases.
- Exposure to API testing tools such as Postman, Swagger, or similar technologies.
- Programming experience with C#, ASP.NET, MVC, jQuery, or related technologies is a strong plus.
- Familiarity with source control systems and CI/CD pipelines is beneficial.