QA Lead (Remote)

We're transforming the grocery industry

At Instacart, we invite the world to share love through food because we believe everyone should have access to the food they love and more time to enjoy it together. Where others see a simple need for grocery delivery, we see exciting complexity and endless opportunity to serve the varied needs of our community. We work to deliver an essential service that customers rely on to get their groceries and household goods, while also offering safe and flexible earnings opportunities to Instacart Personal Shoppers.

Instacart has become a lifeline for millions of people, and we’re building the team to help push our shopping cart forward. If you’re ready to do the best work of your life, come join our table.

Instacart is a Flex First team

There’s no one-size fits all approach to how we do our best work. Our employees have the flexibility to choose where they do their best work—whether it’s from home, an office, or your favorite coffee shop—while staying connected and building community through regular in-person events. Learn more about our flexible approach to where we work.

OVERVIEW

Caper is one of the critical pillars of Instacart’s new Connected Store technology. Caper offers smart shopping carts powered by deep learning and computer vision to enable a seamless grab-and-go retail experience.

ABOUT THE JOB

You will be joining a dynamic team consisting of manual and automation test engineers working on cutting-edge technology. You will be instrumental in leading a team of QAE and automation engineers to drive quality across our software products which are heavily tied into hardware. You are extremely detail-oriented with experience building great software products and improving efficiency. You will establish best practices and standards throughout our QA organization. You will closely collaborate, actively participate, and have a voice on our team to ensure our products are delivered with the highest quality possible.

Responsibilities:

• Lead a team of internal and external QA engineers towards individual and engineering excellence.
• Design and lead large projects on your team and execute on the more complex parts yourself.
• Actively contribute to the daily test efforts: manual and assist in automation.
• Strategize testing and build a test-driven engineering culture that focuses and drives improvements in quality.
• Advocate for higher code quality, test coverage and production excellence while identifying and proposing solutions for risk areas.
• Proactively identify and mitigate risks.
• Partner with the Automation team to leverage automation for better reliability and scalability.
• Have deep technical knowledge of our product features and integration while understanding all the implications of performance, scalability, and robustness.
• Work closely with engineering, product management, cross-department partner teams within an Agile environment using JIRA as our backbone for collaboration.
• Identify, track, and report KPIs and trends.
• You will evolve or build processes and tooling that enhance QA productivity within the team and beyond.
• Be a strong voice of reason exercising clear judgment making data-informed decisions in order to improve and maintain the utmost quality within our products.
• Drive release management activities.
• Daily “bug hunting” – always on the lookout for defects, usability improvements, cosmetic “eye sores”, etc. and properly track them for resolution.

Necessary Qualifications:

• Must be able to report into our New York Office 3-5 days a week.
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or equivalent experience.
• 5+ years of industry experience in Software QA.
• 3+ years of experience leading teams.
• Demonstrate expertise in QA project management and test strategy.
• Ability to effectively evaluate tradeoffs and proactively unblock the team.
• Proficient with Mobile and Web Applications testing.
• Proficient with testing Android OS.
• Proficient with test planning, creating and executing test cases, stress and longevity testing, performance and load testing.
• Proficient with analytic tools: Datadog (or similar)
• Experience programming with Java, Python, shell and/or C++.
• Proficient working with MongoDB and MySQL.
• Proficient interacting with RESTful API and skilled in Rest Assured, Postman (or similar)
• Experience with Gitlab or Github..
• Experience with AWS and microservices.
• Excellent communication and collaboration skills, used to drive an engineering culture of continuous improvement and ownership of quality
• Ability to multi-task on multiple products and projects.
• Strong analytical skills, self-motivation, attention to detail and leadership ability.
• Highly effective communication, both verbal and written.
• Must be able to work on-site in a hybrid environment.

Preferred Qualifications 

• Experience testing hardware products.
• Experience with POS systems including payment terminals, barcode scanners, etc.
• Exposure to automation tooling such as Appium, Espresso, Selenium (or similar)
• Experience with Networking.
• Experience with JIRA and TestRail.
• Experience with AI and ML test principles and strategies is a plus.

Instacart provides highly market-competitive compensation and benefits in each location where our employees work. This role is in office and the base pay range for a successful candidate is dependent on their work location. Please review our Flex First remote work policy here.

Offers may vary based on many factors, such as candidate experience and skills required for the role. Additionally, this role is eligible for a new hire equity grant as well as annual refresh grants. Please read more about our benefits offerings here. 

For New York City, NY based candidates, the base pay ranges for a successful candidate are listed below.

New York City, NY

$174,000—$193,000 USD