QA Scientist | SnapGene

What do we need

Dotmatics is looking for a motivated and hands-on QA Scientist with a background in molecular biology to join the SnapGene team, located in New Zealand. Prior experience in quality assurance is not required — instead, we’re looking for someone eager to apply their scientific training in a new way. You'll learn how to leverage core scientific skills like experimentation, critical thinking, and communication to ensure the delivery of high-quality software for molecular biologists.

As a QA Scientist you'll work on our widely used SnapGene and Geneious software products and play a key role in helping shape a product used daily by researchers around the world. Your scientific expertise will be essential in evaluating the accuracy, usability, and overall quality of the software. You’ll test features with a focus on how real scientists will use them and provide valuable input to both design and development teams.

In addition to hands-on testing, you'll get involved with researching new functionality — from reviewing and evaluating scientific tools and techniques, to participating in user research and gathering feedback — helping to ensure SnapGene and Geneious continue to meet the real-world needs of the molecular biology community.

This position is a hybrid position based in our Auckland office, where you’ll collaborate closely with a globally distributed development team. 

In this role you’ll get to:

• Plan and carry out testing of new and existing features in the software to validate results and identify usability issues.
• Collaborate with the development and design teams to define practical, well-scoped requirements and guide the design of new features.
• Obtain and create data sets to enable testing the software through both realistic user workflows and targeted hypothesis-based testing.
• Research proposed functionality to understand the scientific and user requirements.
• Advocate for the user to ensure that product design is aligned to user needs and expectations. 
• Work with support, marketing and product teams to create and/or review clear and useful help resources for end users. 

We are looking for people who have a degree in Biology or Bioinformatics along with 2+ years of molecular biology lab experience, including molecular cloning. You should be detail-oriented, creative, communicative, and comfortable solving problems independently or collaboratively, and working through ambiguous situations.

The key skills we are looking for: 

• Excellent written communication - clear and concise writing is required for tasks such as documenting results of testing, writing in-app text and contributing to knowledge base content.
• Attention to Detail - Ability to identify bugs in the software, ranging from incorrect analysis results to usability or consistency issues.
• Wet lab experience - Apply what you know about challenges in the lab to building software that helps users avoid mistakes in their construct and experimental design.
• Molecular biology / bioinformatic software experience - Some familiarity with using software, such as Geneious, SnapGene or others, for sequence design and analysis.
• Literature review and recommendation - Summarise key information from the scientific literature, and make recommendations about techniques and tools.
• Experimental design - Ability to apply your existing skills in experimental design to the design of scenarios for testing.
• Scientific communication - break down scientific workflows to help developers and designers without a scientific background understand key information.