Q: What do you do at Jumio and what does your role involve?
I work as a QA engineer in the acquisition backend team. Technically I’m a problem seeker.
I’m experiencing, experimenting and interacting with the software to see whether there are potential issues, communicating those with relevant stakeholders, and being involved throughout the development cycle. The role involves a lot of learning — about the application itself, the domain, the technologies used, the users, etc. The better the understanding of the context, the better one can use available resources to pinpoint and explore areas of risk and potential issues.
Q: What was Jumio’s selling point for you – What made you say “I wanna work there!”?
The opportunities to continuously learn new things on the job combined with the general appreciation of QAs (which is reflected in the developer vs. QA ratio per team), the nature of Jumio’s products, the learning and development budgets, and a more organized approach to product vision and development.
Q: How does your work environment differ from other companies you’ve worked for in the past?
Due to the nature of the Jumio products, I feel like my work here has a real value and impact for end-users.
I also feel that I have more space and time to make use of professional development tools and to convert the learnings into work improvements.
There are also many Jumios who take great care of employee well-being. I could easily create my own comfy space within the company and there is always great fun during company events such as runs, ping-pong games, kitchen breaks or afterwork drinks.
Q: What do most people get wrong about the role?
There are several misconceptions such as “QAs do not need that much technical knowledge” or “You can tell the quality of testing based on the number of test cases” or even “QAs are responsible for the software quality.” I’m grateful that I haven’t come across these stereotypes at Jumio.
Q: What’s the secret to being good at your job?
There’s not a single secret, but there are ingredients for a solid recipe on becoming a decent tester. Without a specific order, you should learn how to:
- Be comfortable learning many new things
- Be comfortable partaking in uncomfortable conversations (As QA, you are often the person breaking the bad news so you need to be alright having those conversations.)
- Be context-sensitive
- Be mindful in handling pressure
- Take care of your relationships with team members
- Accept the fact that mistakes might happen — just try to learn from them and try to avoid repeating them.
Q: What didn’t you expect about the role / what surprised you most?
I think I had a pretty clear understanding of what my role would be like at Jumio. So there wasn’t anything extraordinary, in that sense. What I really enjoy about the people I work with is how different everyone is, but we’re all driven by the same genuine desire to deliver good quality software.
Q: How have you been able to progress your career or learn new things at Jumio?
I have been able to strengthen my technical skill set in areas where I had a bigger knowledge gap, such as automation using Python and Java and load testing. I could also partake in initiatives which didn’t belong to my team if that overlapped with other areas of personal interest.
Q: What would you say to potential employees wanting to work at Jumio? What qualities should they have?
Be open and curious. It is not always about knowing the right answer right away. We work in a complex world filled with unknowns and it is important to know how to approach uncertainty, collaborate with people, and be mindful of our immediate context.
Q. Can you tell us something not a lot of people know about you or the job you do?
I do have difficulties focusing on a single thread for too long. Luckily, my background in classical music trained me to foster this aspect in a meaningful way. This pattern turned out to be useful at the job given the multi-faceted nature of creativity required in finding intricate issues in intricate software ecosystems.