QA Automation Lead

Appsmith is an open-source, low-code platform that helps developers build applications quickly, usually within hours.

Since its inception, Appsmith has gained significant traction, with over 10 million downloads, more than 30,000 stars on GitHub, and adoption by 10,000+ organisations across 150 countries.

Our team is committed to delivering exceptional quality with Appsmith, delighting users and setting a new market standard. We aim to create a product that users consistently rely on for building applications, distinguishing Appsmith from competitors. The product's perceived quality is crucial in shaping users' impressions of its reliability and performance.

A stable, resilient platform serves dual purposes: boosting user retention through dependability, and instilling customer confidence to tackle complex use cases. This confidence comes from Appsmith's ability to handle sophisticated requirements without compromising performance or reliability.

The goal of the team is to iteratively identify and ship projects that improve the performance of Appsmith and help it support 10x of the current traffic in the future

As the Lead Engineer for the QA Team, you will define and implement an automation strategy that aligns with product goals and quality standards. You will oversee the test infrastructure, ensuring its maintenance, optimization, and scalability. The team currently uses Cypress for end-to-end testing, GitHub Actions for continuous integration and deployment, JUnit for Java-based unit testing, and Jest for JavaScript testing. You will be responsible for mentoring and upskilling the team in testing expertise. Your responsibilities will also include writing best practices and ensuring they are followed. Additionally, you will develop processes and ensure adherence to them. You'll contribute to driving major engineering initiatives by defining quality metrics. You will be responsible for mentoring and upskilling the team in testing expertise and help QA engineers grow professionally. It will be your duty to ensure bug prevention through shift left testing and acting as a champion for quality within the organization. You will advocate for the adoption of quality-focused practices across all stages of the development lifecycle. You will work closely with QA, SDET, PM, and Engineers to ensure the success of the product.

Test Automation Strategy

In this role, you will serve as the primary advocate for test automation best practices across the organization. You will establish, document, and enforce standards to ensure that automation efforts are consistent, efficient, and effective. A critical responsibility will be to enhance automation coverage while simultaneously reducing reliance on manual testing, with the goal of achieving near-complete automation.

Collaboration and Guidance

Collaboration with QA engineers and developers will be a key aspect of your role, as you work together to ensure comprehensive test coverage. You will be responsible for creating and maintaining automated tests while also guiding team members in integrating automation into their workflows. Additionally, you will educate the team on the benefits of test automation and demonstrate how to leverage it effectively.

Monitoring and Analysis of Test Results

Another important aspect of this role involves monitoring and analyzing test results by setting up robust reporting systems. You will identify trends in test failures and provide actionable insights to the development team. Using data from test runs, you will proactively address potential issues before they escalate and help prioritize development tasks.

Test Infrastructure Innovation

You will ensure that the test infrastructure remains robust, resilient, and scalable. This includes maintaining existing systems while planning for future growth and incorporating advancements in automation technologies and methodologies. Your goal will be to continuously improve the infrastructure to handle increasing complexity and scale, ensuring that the product maintains the high quality expected by its users.

This position is central to driving automation excellence at Appsmith, enabling efficient testing workflows and maintaining product quality as the organization evolves.

Must have skills

• 10+ years of experience testing software through automation tools such as Cypress/Jest/Mocha/Playwright etc for a SaaS product. This experience helps you understand the software development life cycle and the pitfalls of buggy software.

• Since Appsmith’s integration test suite is written in Cypress or Playwright , prior knowledge of working on this framework will help you hit the ground running.

• Appsmith’s client-side code is written in React. Your understanding of contemporary browser frameworks such as React/Angular will ensure that you are able to understand and communicate the nuances of the product with the rest of the engineering team.

• Software products are only as stable as the APIs they are built on. You should have a good understanding of RESTful APIs and should have worked on API testing tools like Postman before.

• Being able to express your thoughts in code through JavaScript (JS) or TypeScript (TS) is essential to your success since Appsmith’s automation test suites are written in these languages.

• The ability to represent a user base in our automation suite is critical to providing a great experience to users.

• All automation suites require CI/CD pipelines and SQL databases. Familiarity with both will help you stand above the crowd.

Nice to have skills

• Having worked on developer-focused products is an added bonus. This helps you understand our users and their requirements better.

• Prior experience with unit testing through Jest/JUnit will help you break shackles and contribute to the code base across the board.

• At Appsmith we value speed and performance within our product. Being able to write load testing/performance testing scripts will go a long way in keeping our developer users happy.

Hiring Manager Round - In a conversation with a hiring manager we'll discuss your prior work experience and your career aspirations, ensuring it aligns with our expectations for the role. Feel free to ask questions about the team, company, and product.

Prepare by researching Appsmith, focusing on our product and UI editor. Hint: we really appreciate people who have a critical viewpoint on our product. Our motivation internally is to be able to empathise well with our users.

Technical Round - QA Best Practices and Problem Solving -

In this interview round, candidates will participate in a live coding session where they will write Cypress tests for a provided user flow, using a pre-deployed version of Appsmith (without setting it up locally). The goal is to assess several key areas: whether the candidate follows good coding practices, implements Cypress best practices, and demonstrates effective debugging skills if issues arise. Additionally, we’ll evaluate their problem-solving abilities.

CTO Round - This round, led by the CTO and will focus on collaboration and communication. Expect questions about how you have worked with engineering teams to solve complex QA challenges through teamwork, effective communication, and alignment with development processes. The goal is to evaluate how you collaborate with engineers to resolve issues, ensure quality, and contribute to successful product delivery

Culture Fitment - In the final round, meet with one of Appsmith's executive co-founders. This is a culture fit discussion, and you're encouraged to ask questions about our culture, mission, and strategy. It's a chance to understand the broader vision of Appsmith.

• Mission: Be part of a mission-driven company that solves problems that you can relate to. We are on a mission to help developers quickly build & deploy high-quality internal apps.

• Team: We believe in hiring experts for every domain to create a culture of collaboration, innovation, creativity & diversity. Be part of a time that inspires you every day.

• Impact: Play a key role in shaping the future of our platform and delivering features that directly impact our customers' success.

• Flexibility: We believe in unlocking productivity by giving individuals freedom. Work remotely from the EU or India with flexible hours to suit your work style.

If you are passionate about building powerful, user-friendly tools for developers and are an expert in your domain, we would love to hear from you.

• Productivity: Work from anywhere with a budget to set up your home office.

• Flexibility: Work how you are most productive with flexible holiday schedules & work timings.

• Growth: Keep growing with a budget for books, courses & conferences.