I haven’t posted this on our careers page yet nor have I posted it on any job boards. You saw it here first. blist is looking for its first software design engineer in test - SDET.

In case you aren’t an SDET but think you might know of one, let me describe what an SDET does. An SDET gets paid to break otherwise functional software. She inflicts discipline (a.k.a. serious pain and suffering) on software engineers, making sure edge cases are treated like common ones. She writes code to exercise other code. Have you ever been to Ikea and seen that wooden fake rump that simulates someone sitting down over and over again on a chair? Up. Down. Up. Down. That’s the kind of code an SDET writes.

But wait, there’s more.

An SDET promotes and instills a culture of test driven development. She ensures that the code written by a software engineer has unit tests. The SDET spends a lot of her time performing code reviews - sitting side by side with the programmer reviewing the algorithm, code quality and unit tests. A good SDET can help with remediation and performance tuning.

The SDET builds continuous integration servers and test automation systems. Essentially that means that automation fetches the latest code from the source code repository and compiles it. If any component fails to be built successfully, it emails developers to tell them about the failure. If all of the components and the application are built successfully, the test system kicks in performing thousands, even tens of thousands of test plans to ensure that the new code didn’t introduce an undesirable side effect. A defect caused by an undesirable side effect is known as a regression.

An SDET ensures the right quality metrics are being captured and analyzed. At blist, software quality is important enough that quality metrics are included in the nightly metrics report, which is generated automatically and emailed to all blist employees and its board of directors. At blist an SDETs work is important and has broad visibility.

So an SDET helps ensure quality through engagement, interaction, mentorship and automation. She isn’t solely responsible for quality. No SDET can keep up with a team of engineers who don’t take pride in producing quality software to begin with. But a good SDET dramatically raises the bar.

At blist, an SDET is a first class role of the same prestige and esteem as a software engineer. SDETs and software engineers usually have similar educational backgrounds. A degree in computer science is common. The key difference that I’ve seen is that software engineers like assembling things and SDETs like disassembling things.

They’re scarce and valuable. A good SDET is hard to find. If you are one or you know of one let me know. We’re ready to raise the caliber of the team and the quality of our software. You can reach me directly at kevin dot merritt at blist dot com.