Backend QA Engineer

About Lendable

Lendable is on a mission to make consumer finance amazing: faster, cheaper and friendlier.

We’re building one of the world’s leading fintech companies and are off to a strong start:

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• One of the UK’s newest unicorns with a team of just over 250 people
  
• Among the top 10 fastest-growing tech companies in the UK
  
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  Profitable since 2017
  
• Backed by top investors including Balderton Capital and Goldman Sachs
  
  
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  Loved by customers with the best reviews in the market (4.8/5 across 10,000s of reviews)
  

So far, we’ve rebuilt the Big Three consumer finance products from scratch: loans, credit cards and car finance. We get money into our customers’ hands in minutes instead of days.

We’re growing fast, and there’s a lot more to do: we’re going after the two biggest Western markets (UK and US) where trillions worth of these are held by big banks with dated systems and painful processes.

Join us if you want to

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• Take ownership across a broad remit. You are trusted to make decisions that drive a material impact on the direction and success of Lendable from day 1
  
• Work in small teams of exceptional people, who are relentlessly resourceful to solve problems and find smarter solutions than the status quo
  
• Build the best technology in-house, using new data sources, machine learning and AI to make machines do the heavy lifting
  

 About the role

We’re looking for a Backed QA Engineer, experienced with PHP, performance testing microservices, CQRS, message-oriented and event-sourced systems, to join our credit card engineering team and lead our quality focus.

Your responsibilities will include

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  Build out test infrastructure: Add the necessary tools and features to allow our card product to be tested effectively with both manual and automated testing.
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  • Introduce sustainable toolsfor testing against realistic production-like data

    
    

  • Devise and deliver frameworks and strategies for testing microservices, message-driven and eventually consistent systems

    
    

  • Drive continuous refinement and refactoring of our existing extensive test suites.

    
    

  • Lead innovation and automation from a QA perspective through adopting and effectively utilising cutting-edge tooling and libraries.

    
    
  
  

• Support with Non-Functional Testing Infrastructure: Help our engineers set up infrastructure to test the performance and scalability of our products. Identify performance bottlenecks with a data-driven approach, working with technical leaders to ensure our product continues to scale.

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• Set Testing Strategy: Help balance sufficient automated testing before production and optimising time to recovery in production through refining and extending our observability, monitoring and tracing capabilities and lead a shift-left approach to testing, ensuring our software remains testable and tested for the fastest possible feedback loop.

  
  

• Review Incidents: Investigate any recent incidents or near-misses and identify root causes, why tests missed it and create recommendations on how to identify the issues earlier and prevent a recurrence.

  
  

• Test features: While the vast majority of PRs will still go out via the current process, this engineer will be on hand to help test with the more complex features, and supplement the testing work that is currently performed by Product, allowing Product to focus more on the product’s functionality.

  
  

• Discuss edge cases: Offer expert QA perspective in software development ceremonies and design sessions to identify and plan for risks and edge cases of proposed changes and features

  
  

• Highlight test scenarios: Devise test scenarios to address the above.

  
  

• Create checklists: Help us to avoid issues by checking common issues.

  
  

• Guide developers: Integrate into the daily workflow of the Engineering team, offering mentorship for QA best practices throughout our SDLC

  
  

• Leverage Metrics: Refine our definition of done and work directly with teams to achieve more frequent deployments to production, identifying and contributing to bridging current gaps in observability and monitoring.

Day to Day expectations

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• Develop Test Infrastructure (60%): Develop extensions to our codebase to make things easier to test.

  
  

• Build and Document knowledge (20%): Document information about our product and testing infrastructure so that the team can manage it independently.

  
  

• Code Reviews (10%): Assist teams with Code Reviews: Review and guide teams on the most effective testing strategies: 10%

  
  

• Support Teams on Delivery (10%): Help teams deliver by collaborating with them on writing up testing specs, answering quality questions, tracking metrics, prioritising tech debt, OKRs, incidents, retrospective quality actions, etc

  
  

Your Experience

We are looking for a candidate who:

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• Enjoys testing and finding bugs and ensuring that we deliver fantastic software every day.

  
  

• Is passionate about quality and driving constant, small changes for improved software engineering practice

  
  

• Loves working with engineers to inspire them to create fantastic software and embrace a culture of quality

  
  

In addition, we are looking for a candidate with strong technical skills and experience with:

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• PHP 8.1

  
  

• Performance testing tools, such as JMeter or Gatling

  
  

• Testing of microservices and message-driven systems (contract testing and E2E)

  
  

• Testing of systems built upon aCQRS and Event Sourced architecture

  
  

• Working with Datadog for post-deployment monitoring across the three pillars of observability

  
  

• Symfony

  
  

• Strong knowledge of software development fundamentals and experience with multiple languages, including PHP, Javascript, Java/Kotlin and Python

  
  

• Designing and delivering effective testing strategies and policies at all levels from unit testing of components to contract testing of applications

  
  

• Knowledge of the Credit industry and credit cards specifically is a plus.

  
  

Our Tech Stack

Testing

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• Behat

  
  

• PHPUnit

  
  

• Detox

  
  

• Jest

  
  

• Cypress

  
  

• Cucumber.js

  
  

Frontend

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• React & React Native

  
  

• TypeScript

  
  

• MobX

  
  

• NextJS

  
  

• SASS

  
  

Backend

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• PHP 8

  
  

• Symfony 6

  
  

• AWS

  
  

• MySQL

  
  

• PostgreSQL

  
  

• RabbitMQ

  
  

• Docker

  
  

• Kubernetes

  
  

• Terraform

  
  

Other

• Jenkins and GithubActions - we deploy to production as soon as we finish a feature

Interview process

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• A quick phone call with one of the team

  
  

• A short coding exercise to complete in your own time

  
  
• Onsite or Video Interviews 
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  • Technical Coding Assessment

    
    

  • Quality Process Assessment

    
    
  
  
  

• Final interview with the CTO

  
  

Life at Lendable (also check out our Glassdoor page)

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• The opportunity to scale up one of the world’s most successful fintech companies.
  
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  Best-in-class compensation including equity.
  
• You can work from home every Monday and Friday if you wish - on the other days, we all come together IRL to be together, build and exchange ideas.
  
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  Our in-house chef prepares fresh, healthy lunches in the office every Tuesday-Thursday.
  
• We care for our Lendies’ well-being both physically and mentally, so we offer the highest coverage when it comes to private health insurance.
  
  
• We organise an annual trip with the whole company, to celebrate our milestones and reflect on our achievements.
  
• We're an equal-opportunity employer and are looking to make Lendable the most inclusive and open workspace in London.