In this month’s employee spotlight we would like to highlight our QA Lead, Evgeny Vladimirov, based in Montenegro. He has been part of our team for three years now and has played pivotal roles in various projects. In this article, you will get to know more about Evgeny’s position at Aquiva Labs, how he became a QA Lead, and his special advice to anyone who wants to follow his career path!
Landing his first job
Evgeny had an early career start while he was still at university. He combined working and studying to build the necessary work experience and landed a job at Aquiva Labs. He joined the team as a Junior QA Engineer and worked on numerous projects, which has helped him gradually develop soft and hard skills. Now, his career at Aquiva Labs has successfully progressed and he works as a QA Lead.
What Evgeny’s work day looks like
As a QA Lead, Evgeny has to participate in various meetings with the development teams to stay on top of all ongoing projects and support engineers with their tasks. He also holds 1:1 meetings with his QA team to make sure that they are growing professionally and improving their competencies in the areas of their interest. During the day, Evgeny also performs test artifacts reviews to always keep test documentation in good shape. Part of his daily work routine also includes code review of autotests pull requests.
Once he is done with his busy day at work, he enjoys playing board games or playing the guitar in his favorite Metalcore and Black Metal style. “You can call me metal head”, he added. Evgeny also likes to stay active so he always finds time to go to the gym.
Working as a QA Lead is challenging but also very rewarding
As with every job, there are some challenges to overcome. Evgeny works with a large number of projects at the same time. It is not only challenging but also very essential for him to be aware of the status and progress of each project. This allows him to provide adequate help and support to the QA engineers with their tasks and organize project testing. Evgeny is very team-oriented and truly cares about his team members. That’s why the most rewarding part of his job is seeing his team enjoy their work and grow professionally.
You never get bored at Aquiva Labs
During his time at Aquiva Labs, Evgeny has worked on a wide range of tasks. He finds this to be an important building block of anyone’s career and knowledge base. He has been involved in both manual and automated testing, CI/CD implementations, and static code analysis. Additionally, he has also worked as a scrum master and has built and supported development processes within the team. “At Aquiva Labs you never get bored”, Evgeny shared.
The variety of projects and career development is not the only thing that Evgeny values. He appreciates the work environment and his colleagues who are true professionals in their field, very responsive, and always ready to help with anything.
How to become a good QA Lead and Engineer
Evgeny has great advice for anyone that is on the same career path or has just started in this field.
“The area in which a QA Lead or an Engineer can be useful is very wide. In my opinion, a good QA Engineer is first and foremost a good analyst. Improve your impact analysis skills, mindfulness, and attention to details”, he stated.
For manual testing, he suggests looking into books and taking courses to learn new programming languages. In his case, he believes that Java is the preferred and widely used language, so learning it will give you a head start in your career and bonus points on your job application! Salesforce courses and certificates are very useful too, especially if you want to land a job in the Salesforce ecosystem.
“If you want to work and develop in the Salesforce ecosystem, Aquiva Labs is a great place!”
Although learning theory and practicing programming languages is essential, hard skills are not enough to become an excellent QA Lead or Engineer. You will need to find time to improve your soft skills too. Evgeny recommends taking scrum and agile training.
Evgeny’s work life at Aquiva Labs is definitely not boring, right? If you feel like you want to follow his career path and join our team of experts, check out our open positions and apply today! We provide career development opportunities, access to official Salesforce courses, certifications, flexible working conditions, and a team of amazing professionals!