Junior QA Engineer

Essential Responsibilities

• Functional & Domain-Aware Testing: Test the simulation cloud application, building up a working understanding of hydraulic fracturing physics (fracture initiation/propagation, proppant transport, fracture geometry and conductivity) and reservoir simulation concepts (pressure depletion, production response), enough to judge whether results and application behavior look physically and functionally reasonable.
• Requirements Analysis: Analyze feature requirements, acceptance criteria, and expected product behavior across the Case → Study → Well → Job → Output workflow and translate them into concrete test scenarios and test cases.
• Defect Identification & Reporting: Identify, reproduce, and report defects with clear root-cause context (e.g. whether an issue traces to the simulation engine, the API/application layer, or the client) and supporting evidence such as logs, traces, job status, screenshots, and exported output files.
• Manual & Exploratory Testing: Execute manual, exploratory, regression, integration, and end-to-end testing across the full application and should be able to arrive on scenarios to validate the workflow.
• UI Test Automation: Enhance and maintain the existing Playwright automation framework covering the ShaleSim web client (Case setup, job monitoring, and output/visualization pages).
• API Test Automation: Develop and maintain API automation tests against the ShaleSim web API, covering core workflows such as case/well/study management, file imports, job submission, and output retrieval.
• CI/CD & Template Validation: Maintain CI/CD pipelines that support automated test execution and template validation — confirming that reference simulation case templates continue to produce expected engine output as the codebase evolves.
• Non-Functional Testing: Perform stress, performance, negative, and boundary testing — including large multi-well/multi-stage cases and malformed or edge-case input data — to validate product reliability and scalability.
• Collaboration: Collaborate closely with developers, product management, and domain experts throughout agile ceremonies, sprint planning, and regression sign-off for both application and engine changes.

Required Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in a science or engineering discipline (e.g. Computer Science, Software Engineering, Physics, Chemistry, Chemical, Mechanical, or Petroleum Engineering) — or equivalent practical experience.
• 0–2 years of experience in software testing/QA; relevant internship, co-op, or academic project experience is welcome for this junior-level role.
• Working knowledge of software testing fundamentals: test case design, defect lifecycle management, and manual/exploratory testing technique.
• Demonstrated ability to pick up unfamiliar technical concepts quickly and apply them — a science or engineering foundation matters more here than any prior exposure to hydraulic fracturing or reservoir simulation.
• Some exposure to test automation (any framework or language) and a willingness to grow into Playwright and API test automation specifically.
• Comfortable with Git and command-line tooling with strong written communication skills for clear, reproducible defect reports.

Preferred Qualifications

• Hands-on experience with Playwright, or a comparable UI automation framework (e.g. Selenium, Cypress).
• Experience writing automated API tests (e.g. Postman/Newman, RestSharp, or similar).
• Exposure to CI/CD tooling, ideally Azure DevOps Pipelines.
• Experience testing engineering, scientific, or otherwise data/numerically-heavy applications.
• Familiarity with containerized development environments (Docker/Podman) and AWS fundamentals.