"Testscaling" with Test Engineering

What we believe

There are many different opinions about which member of the team is responsible for the design, development and maintenance of automated tests. In many companies, there are lines of demarcation that put testing squarely on the shoulders of a test organization. We believe that is a mistake. 

Grumpy Cat -- Tester Edition

At LinkedIn, it’s clear that software engineering and testing go hand in hand, and all engineers test. Test-related activities should be omnipresent in any software development process. Further, testable and well-tested code requires continuous conversations, collaboration, and work that span across the entire engineering organization. Test Engineers play an integral part of advancing test innovation and craftsmanship practices, speeding up LinkedIn’s product development process and ensuring that our products are well tested.

What we do

LinkedIn Test Engineers are software engineers who really enjoy solving problems. We understand that each code commit aims to improve something for our members, and sometimes they deliver transformational experiences. The faster these commits make it to our end users, the sooner we can help our members be more productive and successful. The problem is that each code commit can also introduce one or more issues. How do we find them quickly enough to avoid blocking developers? 

Towards that end, test engineers develop strategies, tools, frameworks, and harnesses to simplify testing and support rapid deployment of high quality changes to production as fast as their team wants. We partner with other employees in the Engineering, Tools, and Operations departments to tackle test or environment flakiness, keep tests stable, and attack any friction in our engineering process around testing and quality. 

Test Engineers also typically have the best understanding of how different things work together (apps and services, systems, tests, tools, infrastructure, etc). With this big picture perspective, we dig into LinkedIn’s code, identify problematic areas, and constantly invent better ways to catch issues. Our fingerprints can be found on tests in all corners of our codebase. 

How do you know if you are a great fit?

  • You are excited about making a massive impact in how testing evolves across thousands of engineers, and releasing bulletproof experiences across our 417 million members.
  • You already think about testability before a line of code has been written, or change existing code to support it.
  • You are interested in working with and understanding other systems, infrastructure and technologies that support products at scale.
  • When you code, you can’t help thinking of what unit tests are needed and how to abstract the common tasks.
  • You think code reviews are a great team building exercise and love giving and receiving insightful feedback.
  • You would rather have a CLI (command-line interface) than a GUI.
  • You believe reviewing application code is standard for designing effective test strategies and knowing what dependencies exist.
  • When you hear others talk about spying at work, you think JavaScript, mocks, or stubs. Not James Bond.
James Bond, software tester

Do you have what it takes? 

If you believe you would have fun and excel under the demands of being a Test Engineer at Linkedin, and you relish the opportunity to work with really smart people who use and build world-class technologies to impact members’ lives, we’d love to have you join our team! Please go to this link, submit your LinkedIn profile, and you’ll hear from us soon. We have positions open in Mountain View, Sunnyvale, San Francisco, New York, and Bangalore.