Graduate Quality Analyst 2021

Want to work in an inclusive, supportive environment where you can freely voice your ideas and opinions?

Thoughtworks is a global software consultancy with an aim to create a positive impact on the world through technology. Our community of technologists thinks disruptively to deliver pragmatic solutions for our clients' most complex challenges. We are curious minds who come together as collaborative and inclusive teams to push boundaries, free to be ourselves and make our mark in tech.

Our developers have been contributing code to major organisations and open source projects for over 25 years. They’ve also been writing books, speaking at conferences and helping push software development forward, changing companies and even industries along the way. We passionately believe that software quality is driven by open communication, review and collaboration. That’s why we’re such vehement supporters of open source and have made significant contributions to open source tools for testing, continuous delivery (GoCD), continuous integration (CruiseControl), machine learning and healthcare.

As consultants, we work onsite with our clients to ensure we’re evolving their technology and empowering adaptive mindsets to meet their business goals. You could influence the digital strategy of a retail giant, build a bold new mobile application for a bank or redesign platforms using event sourcing and intelligent data pipelines. You will learn how to apply the latest Lean and Agile thinking, create pragmatic solutions to solve mission-critical problems and challenge yourself every day.

Our graduates jumpstart their careers with a trip to ThoughtWorks University (TWU): a six-week training program in India or China (virtual at present). When you return home, the Graduate Engagement Lead provides continual on-boarding support to help you settle into Thoughtworks.

The Quality Analyst (QA) role is an integral part of a software delivery team, and is one of the core disciplines at Thoughtworks. Sometimes referred to as “the glue within a team”, a QA combines the unique expertise of having an eye for detail and an understanding of the big picture at the same time while driven by an innate passion to constantly learn and grow by questioning the obvious. They focus on exploring every area of the project and work through issues collaboratively to avoid any potential risk to the product delivery. This requires general understanding of different  aspects of a software lifecycle, and an interest in communicating and collaborating with people from technical and business backgrounds.

A role with regular, consistent tasks it is not! A role which helps a team focus on business value and “building the correct product in the correct manner” it is. If you have a passion to know how and why everything works, and the confidence and commitment to question in order to understand, a QA career could well be what you are looking for.

The overall objective is to help deliver business value (quality product) to the end users as quickly as possible with a minimum cost

What you will bring

• You will bring in the quality mindset and create a culture of quality within the team.
• You will recognise the importance of understanding risk and can highlight where the risk lies in a system
• You will analyse end-to-end processes in addition to what and how to test, ensuring quality is embedded throughout
• You will provide input for and champion product testability 
• You will work alongside teammates from different backgrounds to produce awesome solutions for our clients’ ambitious missions
• You will support the team with test approaches during the software development process 
• You get excited to focus on cross-functional requirements such as performance and security

What we’re looking for

• You have less than 1 year of professional experience working as a QA
• You have an eye for details, spotting any gaps in processes or technology
• You are able to think outside the box and look beyond the obvious for solutions and ideas which many around you might not have thought of
• You have a critical thinking to ask questions and analytical ability to solve challenges
• You are curious enough to investigate and explore, be it software or objects of daily use
• You can zoom in and out looking at the details as well as the big picture to identify gaps in quality
• You can empathise with end users and customers for whom the product is being built and are able to provide insights from that perspective and will have the ability to communicate those insights in a clear and concise manner
• You’re willing and able to commit to travelling up to 100%* (back home on the weekends) across the UK and Europe to help our clients solve their business problems. * Currently limited travel, based on client arrangements, though we are likely to return to a more steady state of client-site work through 2021
• You thrive in a collaborative and un-hierarchical environment 
• You have a passion for learning and unlearning to create meaningful solutions for business problems
• You’re resilient in ambiguous situations and can approach challenges from multiple perspectives

A few important things to know

Projects are almost exclusively on customer sites, so candidates should be flexible and open to extensive travel. (As above, currently limited travel, based on client arrangements, though we are likely to return to a more steady state of client-site work through 2021)

Please note we are currently recruiting for our next intake of the 2021 programme which will start in October 2021.