Production Readiness & QA Specialist

Company Overview 

Smarter Grid Solutions (SGS) provides products and consultancy services that enable utilities and developers/operators to integrate distributed energy resources (DER) into and onto the grid, including solar, wind and storage, across all deployment scales. Our world-leading Active Network Management technology is the core component of a unique distributed energy resource management system that uses real-time functionality to manage and control the operation of renewable and other new grid edge energy resources.  Our products are transforming the utilization and resiliency of the grid, securely managing connected resources at greatly reduced cost. 

SGS was formed in 2008, originating from the Institute for Energy and Environment at the University of Strathclyde in the UK.  In 2020, SGS was acquired by Mitsubishi Electric Power Products Inc (MEPPI), a wholly owned American subsidiary of Mitsubishi corporation.  

Role Overview  

Working across our Product Development team, the role of Production Readiness & QA Specialist is central to ensuring the quality, scalability, robustness, and performance of our product suite by carrying out large-scale acceptance, performance, capacity and resiliency tests. You will be responsible for planning, designing, and executing these tests by working closely with key stakeholders and various areas of the business, to understand and deliver functional and non-functional requirements. 
 
Responsibilities and Objectives  

• Build, configure and test SGS systems across functional and non-functional requirements to ensure the production readiness of our products and associated infrastructure.  

• Creation of test plans to clearly define the test approach for production readiness testing.  

• Creation and maintenance of production readiness tests – for instance performance, resiliency and load tests for key Integration points and E2E scenarios for our product REST APIs. 

• Performance and load testing to ensure correctness of operation across defined networks of devices. 

• Supporting scalable functionality and building out a suite of scenarios, testing coverage of high throughput services. 

• Define standards to which test scripts should conform, ensuring consistency and safeguarding of sensitive data such as credentials. 

• Working closely across teams such as product, development, architecture, and DevOps to build, prioritise and maintain an active Production Readiness backlog. 

• Define cross team standard Production Readiness checklists and own reporting of conformity; where applicable contribute to making changes to allow conformity.  

• Ongoing maintenance of performance test tooling and related infrastructure. 

• Contribute to typical Agile ceremonies across platform teams; daily stand-ups, sprint planning & retrospectives as and when the workload dictates.  

• Communicating all test issues effectively and executing procedures to arrive at the appropriate solution. 

• Identifying improvements, innovations and adoption of appropriate tooling and infrastructure to assist in testing of requirements and production readiness. 

• Configuration and testing of software platforms and applications in various environments. 

Required Skills, Experience and Capabilities  

• Ownership and experience of developing, executing, and maintaining performance test scripts, using specialised tooling such as Grafana’s K6 (Or equivalent), utilising JavaScript. 

• Experience in other areas of non-functional testing such as; accessibility, compatibility, usability, resiliency, and failover would be beneficial. 

• Our current stack includes Playwright, Cypress, K6 and JetBrains IDEs so strong hands-on experience in these areas will be highly valued. 

• Extensive usage of recognised Test Management tools to account for test and reporting management, e.g. Testmo, Azure DevOps, Zephyr 

• Ownership of Production Readiness activities through the delivery process; tracking of tasks and production of accurate and timely reporting. 

• Develop detailed reports on system performance, reliability, and scalability to produce recommendations. 

• Integrating automated performance scripts into CI/CD pipelines. 

• Experience with cloud environments (AWS preferred and containerised apps (Docker/Kubernetes). 

• Collaborate with internal cross-functional teams. 

• Extensive experience in testing RESTful microservices. 

• Experience in; Test Analysis, Design, Execution and Defect Management with a focus on Automated Performance Testing. 

• Knowledge of the Atlassian suite of tools, including JIRA, Confluence, and working knowledge of Gitlab, or equivalent. 
   

Qualifications and Experience  

• BSc/BEng/MSc/MEng in electrical engineering, industrial control, computer science or similar discipline 

• 5+ years of industry experience developing and testing software. 

• ISTQB/ISEB Foundation Certificate in Testing. 

• Strong understanding of different testing techniques and approaches with the insight to know when best to use them. 

• Experience of leading, scripting, executing & maintaining automated regression & Non-functional testing. 
   

Essential attributes, skills, and experience  

• Team player & highly collaborative. 

• Effective communication skills. 

• Self-motivated and self-starter. 

• The drive to continuous personal improvement. 

• Flexible/adaptable. 

• Quality focussed. 

• Mentoring / supporting fellow team members & seeking ways to improve our systems & services. 

  Benefits: 

• Competitive salary, dependent upon experience   

• 33 days holiday  

• 5% matched Employer pension scheme 

• Opportunity to participate in the Company’s Profit-Sharing Incentive Bonus scheme, up to a maximum of 12% of base salary

• Private Medical Insurance through Vitality 

• Life Cover (3x) 

• Cyclescheme