Quality Department SET Career Framework: Staff

Quality Department Competencies: Staff

Engineering Framework | Quality Framework

Staff at GitLab are expected to exhibit the following competencies:

• Staff Leadership Competencies
• Staff Technical Competencies
• Staff Values Alignment

Staff Leadership Competencies

Engineering

A staff engineer generally operates at a team level scope, serving as the technical leader for one or more of their team’s domains of responsibility.

• Helps others across the organization understand their team’s domain and technology.
• Communicates clearly and effectively with team members and stable counterparts.
• Makes responsible decisions and evaluates tradeoffs impacting their team’s domain.
• Exhibits a deep understanding of their team’s features, how customers use them, and how they fit into the larger business.
• Improves team processes.
• Recognizes good solutions and clearly explains their merits to relevant stakeholders.
• Unblocks and enables team members and counterparts.
• Participates in processes which address complex technical challenges, such as the Architecture Design Process, as a DRI.

Staff Technical Competencies

Quality

• Test Strategy (Quad Planning) & Test Coverage
  • Own quad planning efforts and proactively optimize test coverage.
  • Coach other SETs and fellow counterpart team members on effective testing strategies and implementation of test automation for new features.
  • Proactively manage the competing priorities and potential collisions of concurrent projects to reduce risk, increase test coverage, and leverage efficiency gains in overlapping testing activities.
  • Identify and design potential new testing practices/tools/frameworks, demonstrate their value, and implement in collaboration with other Software Engineers in Test.
  • Provide risk analysis and input on test strategy, refine tests at all levels to ensure efficient coverage and effective deduplication, and steer the team to optimal test coverage.
• Test Stability & Triage
  • Proactively manage triage and test pipeline stabilization activities.
  • Participate in test pipeline on-call rotation and ensure that pipeline failures are triaged, addressed and communicated in a timely manner.
  • Take ownership of unquarantining flaky tests. Help debug failures to unblock the current on-call engineers.
  • Work with Infrastructure and the counterpart stage to address test failures related to test environments or bugs in code.
  • Proactively identify and implement improvements to our process and test architecture to improve stability and reduce flakiness.
• Test Tooling
  • Lead test automation infrastructure implementation across multiple product areas in collaboration with stage group, functional area counterparts and Quality Department team members.
  • Work across departments to identify, plan, and execute improvements/refinements.
  • Keep up-to-date on industry developments and conduct spikes/Proofs-of-Concept on potential improvements or new tooling.
• Test Environments
  • Setup and maintain new GitLab test environments for your stable counterpart group.
  • Leverage provisioning technologies (e.g. Omnibus, the Orchestrator, Terraform, Ansible, Kubernetes, Helm Charts, GCP, or AWS) and work with infrastructure and distribution teams as needed.
• Task Management & OKRs
  • Work on complex department initiatives that have an impact on the company’s bottom line.
  • Defines and delivers OKR that aligns with Company and Department initiatives.
  • Define and independently manages multiple projects within the department.
  • Able to create new methods for obtaining results.
  • Analyze engineering metrics and make suggestions to improve engineering processes and velocity.
  • Contributes to Working Groups as a Quality lead.
• Knowledge Sharing
  • Clearly document, review, and broadly share our process and knowledge. This could be across mediums (recorded videos, written artifacts) and may include activities like:
    • Participating in customer calls and taking part in Engineering outreach.
    • Hosting AMAs or office hours.
    • Speaking at conferences or meet-ups.
  • And must include activities like:
    • Mentoring Intermediate and Senior SETs.
    • Recording demos and walkthroughs.
    • Regularly authoring and reviewing new content from the department to the company blog and handbook.
• Domain specific expertise
  • Demonstrate domain specific responsibilities within their assigned product stage.

Staff Values Alignment

GitLab

• Adhere to the Collaboration Competencies for this job grade.
• Adhere to the Results Competencies for this job grade.
• Adhere to the Efficiency Competencies for this job grade.
• Adhere to the Diversity, Inclusion & Belonging Competencies for this job grade.
• Adhere to the Iteration Competencies for this job grade.
• Adhere to the Transparency Competencies for this job grade.

Staff Career Matrix Worksheet

Template for Staff Career Matrix Worksheet can be found here.

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