Software Quality Engineer - Item Assist product

Summary:  

As a Software Quality Engineer, you will be responsible for the quality of the Item Assist product, a relatively new product offering from Pearson VUE.  Testing new features and ensuring robust regression testing are the main job duties.  Automated testing will be a heavy focus and there will only be minimal need to do manual testing.  You’ll partner with the Business Analyst, the Product Manager, and the developers to understand the business requirements and test that the completed work meets those requirements.  You’ll use your creativity to think of ways to stretch the product to its limits and to test all the different ways users might interact with the product.  You’ll be part of a USA-based team of 3 total engineers that take day-to-day work direction from the Team Lead. 

The Product:  

Our Item Assist product started off as a prototype tool for letting users use generative AI (Artificial Intelligence) to create test questions.  Expanding the capabilities of Item Assist beyond the limited prototype into a web-based production system is the long-term mission of this software product team.  At Pearson VUE we have many ideas of how to use generative AI to serve our customers and after extensive research we are making Item Assist our first AI-powered product. 

Special note: this role and this specific team will not be doing AI-based development work.  Other engineering teams at Pearson are working on the AI capabilities that power the Item Assist product.  The Item Assist product and this team’s work represents the user interface and the application experience for our customers.  Therefore skills like machine learning, prompting, LLM models, etc are not applicable to this role, but some knowledge about AI concepts could be beneficial. 

Testing technologies will include Gauge for Behavior-driven development (BDD) testing, Java for the implementation code of Gauge, and BrowserStack for test execution.  Item Assist’s product tech stack is Java (currently version 11) with Spring Boot, Angular (currently version 13), MariaDB, and we strive to use modern versions of our software.  Item Assist runs in Microsoft Azure using cloud CDN and containerized backend services orchestrated by Kubernetes. 

Work Location: 

REMOTE - United States , required to work mostly Central time zone normal business hours.

Duties 

• Assist the Business Analyst in creating robust product requirements 

• Lead the process of defining the testing scope with the participation of others on the team 

• Create automated tests to verify correctness of the product 

• Update and maintain the automated tests to be reliable 

• Create defects in the tracking system for issues that you find 

• Demonstrate the team’s work to internal stakeholders 

 
Required Education and Experience:    

• 3+ years work experience in a software quality function 

• 3+ years experience with automated testing technologies, BDD preferred 

• Experience testing web applications 

• Experience with or demonstrated ability to learn Java 

• Bachelor degree in Computer Science, MIS, or equivalent technology discipline 

 
Desired Knowledge, Skills, and Abilities:     

• Ability to capture error information and interpret it to identify a likely root cause 

• Clear communication skills 

• Creativity and the ability to think about possible user behaviors 

• Experience in an Agile software development environment 

Compensation at Pearson is influenced by a wide array of factors including but not limited to skill set, level of experience, and specific location. As required by the Colorado, California, Washington State, New York State and New York City laws, the pay range for this position is as follows: 

The minimum full-time salary range is between $90k- 100k. 

This position is not eligible to participate in an annual incentive program, and information on benefits offered is here.

What to expect from Pearson

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