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Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for Verification Testing Specialist

💰 $70,000 - $120,000

Quality AssuranceSoftware TestingITEngineering

🎯 Role Definition

The Verification Testing Specialist leads verification testing efforts across product releases, owns test strategies and execution for functional, integration, regression, API, performance and security verification, and partners with development, product and operations to ensure defects are captured, triaged, and resolved. This role requires a mix of hands-on test automation engineering, strong test design and analytical skills, and the ability to communicate risks and results clearly to technical and non-technical stakeholders.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

  • QA Analyst / Test Analyst
  • Software Test Engineer
  • Quality Assurance Engineer

Advancement To:

  • Senior Verification/Test Engineer
  • Test Lead / QA Lead
  • Quality Assurance Manager / Head of QA

Lateral Moves:

  • DevOps Engineer (test automation/CI focus)
  • Release Manager
  • Product Quality Engineer

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

  • Develop and own comprehensive verification testing strategies and end-to-end test plans for new features and releases, incorporating risk-based testing, traceability matrices, and acceptance criteria aligned with product requirements.
  • Design, author and maintain detailed manual and automated test cases, test scripts and reusable test suites to validate functional, integration, regression, and end-to-end scenarios across web, API and mobile platforms.
  • Implement and maintain automated test frameworks (e.g., Selenium WebDriver, Appium, Cypress, Playwright) with best practices for modularity, scalability, and maintainability to increase automation coverage and reduce manual regression effort.
  • Execute and orchestrate automated and manual test cycles across CI/CD pipelines (Jenkins, GitLab CI, Azure DevOps), ensuring tests are triggered as part of builds, and failures are clearly reported and triaged.
  • Perform robust API and service layer verification using Postman, REST-assured, SoapUI or similar tools to validate contract, error handling, data integrity and backward compatibility.
  • Lead integration testing efforts across microservices, third-party integrations and data pipelines to identify interface defects, data mismatches and transactional issues prior to release.
  • Plan and execute regression, smoke, sanity, and release verification test runs to validate stability and readiness of builds for staging and production deployments.
  • Create, manage, and analyze test data and environment setup instructions; coordinate test environments with DevOps to ensure reproducible test conditions including database seeding, mocks, and stubs.
  • Log, prioritize, and manage defects using JIRA (or similar), perform detailed root cause analysis, and partner with development teams to reproduce, investigate and validate fixes.
  • Define, collect and report key verification metrics (test coverage, pass/fail rates, defect density, test execution trends) and deliver concise quality dashboards and release readiness summaries to stakeholders.
  • Drive test automation strategy and roadmap, evaluate and adopt new tools and technologies to expand automation scope (UI, API, performance, accessibility) and reduce cycle times.
  • Conduct performance, load and scalability verification using tools like JMeter, Gatling or k6 to identify bottlenecks, memory leaks, and throughput limitations under realistic workloads.
  • Collaborate with security and compliance teams to run verification checks for authentication, authorization, input validation, and OWASP class vulnerabilities as part of secure-by-design testing.
  • Mentor and coach junior testers and cross-functional team members on verification best practices, test design techniques, automation patterns and effective defect reporting.
  • Work with product owners and business analysts to translate requirements and user stories into clear, testable acceptance criteria and verification scenarios, supporting BDD/Gherkin where applicable.
  • Participate in sprint planning, refinement and retrospectives, estimate testing effort, provide testability feedback, and help prioritize quality-related work with Agile teams.
  • Maintain and evolve test documentation including test plans, test case repositories, verification checklists, and runbooks to ensure reproducibility and auditability.
  • Validate fixes in pre-production and production environments, perform post-deployment verification and rollback validation procedures when necessary to minimize customer impact.
  • Drive continuous improvement initiatives to reduce escaped defects, shorten verification cycles, and increase automation ROI by conducting post-mortems and acting on lessons learned.
  • Ensure compliance with regulatory and industry standards where relevant (HIPAA, PCI, ISO, GDPR), by incorporating compliance verification tasks into test plans and evidence collection.
  • Coordinate and execute user acceptance testing (UAT) programs with business stakeholders, collecting sign-off artifacts and ensuring that acceptance criteria are met before production release.
  • Evaluate and integrate test management tools (TestRail, Zephyr, qTest) and reporting systems to centralize test artifacts, support traceability and streamline QA workflows.
  • Maintain strong cross-functional communication with Product, Engineering, DevOps, and Support teams to escalate quality risks, clarify issues and align on remediation plans.

Secondary Functions

  • Support ad-hoc data requests and exploratory data analysis to validate data transformations and analytics outputs.
  • Contribute to the organization's data strategy and roadmap by identifying verification requirements for data pipelines and ETL processes.
  • Collaborate with business units to translate data needs into engineering requirements and define acceptance criteria for verification.
  • Participate in sprint planning and agile ceremonies within the data engineering team.
  • Assist in onboarding and knowledge transfer activities for new QA hires and contractors.
  • Help maintain a central repository of test automation assets, shared utilities, and CI/CD job definitions for reuse across teams.
  • Engage in cross-team initiatives to standardize test environments, baseline test datasets, and access controls to streamline verification activities.
  • Help evaluate vendor and third-party software from a verification perspective, including through-the-fence testing and integration proofs-of-concept.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

  • Test planning and strategy development for functional, integration, regression, API, performance and security verification.
  • Test automation development using Selenium WebDriver, Appium, Cypress, Playwright or equivalent frameworks.
  • API testing and validation using Postman, REST-assured, SoapUI, or similar tools; strong understanding of REST/HTTP and JSON/XML.
  • Scripting and programming skills in Python, Java, JavaScript/TypeScript, or C# for writing test automation and test utilities.
  • Experience with CI/CD platforms and pipeline integration: Jenkins, GitLab CI, Azure DevOps, CircleCI.
  • Test management and traceability with tools like TestRail, Zephyr, qTest, or similar test case repositories.
  • Defect tracking and workflow management using JIRA, Bugzilla, or comparable systems.
  • SQL and database verification skills (PostgreSQL, MySQL, Oracle, or SQL Server) for data validation and test data preparation.
  • Performance and load testing using JMeter, Gatling, k6 or similar tools, plus the ability to analyze performance metrics.
  • Familiarity with containers and environment orchestration (Docker, Kubernetes) to manage reproducible test environments.
  • Knowledge of security testing basics and OWASP Top Ten verification techniques.
  • Experience with mobile testing frameworks and device farms for Android/iOS (Appium, BrowserStack, Sauce Labs).
  • Experience with test-driven or behavior-driven development practices (TDD/BDD), Cucumber, Gherkin preferred.
  • Automation framework design skills: page-object patterns, modular test libraries, CI-integrated reporting and artifact collection.
  • Understanding of Agile and DevOps principles, and how verification fits into continuous delivery pipelines.
  • Familiarity with accessibility (WCAG) and compliance testing tools and practices is a plus.
  • Experience with source control and branching workflows using Git and GitHub/GitLab/Bitbucket.

Soft Skills

  • Strong verbal and written communication skills to convey technical test results, risks and remediation plans to cross-functional teams and stakeholders.
  • Analytical mindset and attention to detail to design effective test cases and quickly identify root causes of defects.
  • Problem-solving orientation and the ability to work through ambiguous scenarios to deliver verifiable outcomes.
  • Collaboration and stakeholder management skills to coordinate verification across product, development, operations and business teams.
  • Time management and prioritization capabilities to balance testing across multiple concurrent releases.
  • Adaptability and continuous learning mindset to evaluate and adopt new verification tools and practices.
  • Leadership and mentorship skills to guide junior testers, promote quality best practices and foster a culture of accountability.
  • Customer-focused approach to understand user impact, acceptance criteria and deliver high-quality experiences.
  • Resilience and ownership in high-pressure release windows — able to drive testing efforts and decisions under tight timelines.
  • Detail-oriented documentation and process orientation to maintain test artifacts, runbooks and audit trails.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

  • Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Information Systems, Electrical Engineering, or a related technical field.

Preferred Education:

  • Master's degree in a relevant discipline or equivalent professional training.
  • Professional certifications such as ISTQB (Foundation/Advanced), CSTE, or Certified Scrum Tester.

Relevant Fields of Study:

  • Computer Science
  • Software Engineering
  • Information Technology
  • Data Science
  • Systems Engineering

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range:

  • 3 to 7 years of hands-on software verification/testing experience for standard roles.
  • 5+ years preferred for senior or specialist positions requiring full automation ownership and cross-functional leadership.

Preferred:

  • Demonstrable experience building and maintaining test automation frameworks and integrating tests into CI/CD pipelines.
  • Proven track record of reducing escaped defects, improving regression cycle times, and delivering measurable QA process improvements.
  • Industry-specific experience (finance, healthcare, telecommunications, embedded systems) where domain knowledge and compliance testing are beneficial.
  • Prior experience working in Agile/Scrum teams and contributing to continuous delivery practices.
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