Quality Assurance Specialist

Quality begins with the design and doesn’t end until a service is decommissioned. As a Quality Assurance Specialist, you help teams treat quality not as an end goal, but as an integral part of the product development process. You bring structure where it’s lacking and give teams the framework and confidence to take ownership of what they deliver.

Where you will work

SURF is the IT cooperative for Dutch education and research institutions. Together with them, we work on digital services and complex innovation challenges to improve the quality of education and research.

Our organization is growing rapidly, and with it, the complexity of the landscape. Whereas much was previously outsourced to external parties, we are increasingly building things ourselves, with our own developers. We are building a portfolio of interoperable services: Service A uses functionalities from Service B, and multiple services run on shared platforms and middleware. These dependencies make quality assurance—and end-to-end testing in particular—more urgent than ever.

We strive to build everything as open source. This also applies to test code and test infrastructure, and it means that quality is not only felt internally but is visible to the institutions and communities we work for. This places high demands on how quality assurance is organized and documented.

Currently, QA is not yet structurally embedded. Testers are hired on a per-project basis. The growing interdependence between services calls for end-to-end testing that still needs to take shape, and teams are seeking guidance on test strategies, code quality, and the Definition of Done. You’ll help change that—not by taking over, but by setting it up together with developers, (technical) product managers, designers, Scrum Masters, and the Agile Coach, so that quality becomes a true team responsibility.

The team you will join

You will become part of the development organization’s setup team: a multidisciplinary team of specialists in development, design, architecture, agile working, privacy & security, and organizational development. You will primarily collaborate with the Accessible and Open Education & Research unit and will initially operate at the intersection of SURF and NPuls, the national program for digital transformation in education.

What you will do

As a Quality Assurance Specialist, you’ll serve in an advisory and investigative capacity. You’ll identify what’s needed and provide concrete support to the organization—from test strategies and policies to automation. Together with the agile coach, you’ll encourage teams to work with a Definition of Done, leaving it up to the teams themselves to define what that means.

Other responsibilities include:

• Investigating how QA is currently structured and what is structurally needed to embed quality assurance sustainably, including defining quality requirements and testing methods in accordance with ISO 27001 and NIS 2.
• Advising (technical) product managers on testing strategies appropriate to the nature and risk profile of a service, and assisting in formulating a Definition of Done.
• Providing developers with frameworks regarding code quality, testability, and testing responsibility, leveraging the capabilities of the internal developer platform.
• Contributing to end-to-end testing: how dependencies between services are systematically tested, including test code and infrastructure that comply with open-source standards.
• Coordinate with service and UX designers regarding their role in quality assurance, including usability and accessibility testing, and contribute to a culture where quality is a shared responsibility.
• Explore the use of AI within quality assurance: where it accelerates testing and where human judgment remains irreplaceable.

Your skills and experience

You’re a generalist with depth: you understand how software is built and how organizations operate, and you can bridge those two worlds. You don’t shy away from the complexity of an environment that’s still evolving; in fact, you thrive on building something that doesn’t yet exist.

In addition, you have:

• A college or university level of work and thinking in IT, software engineering, or a related field, with demonstrable experience in setting up QA processes within an agile development organization.
• Knowledge of testing strategies, risk-based testing, and test automation, including CI/CD integration.
• Experience with API and integration testing in an environment with supply chain dependencies.
• Experience with non-functional quality aspects such as performance, security, and accessibility (WCAG), and with embedding quality requirements in Definition of Done agreements.
• The ability to advise without direct supervision; you convince through knowledge and trust, not through hierarchy.
• A clear, critical view of AI tooling: you leverage the possibilities without losing sight of the limitations.

It would be great if you:

• Have experience with quality assurance in an open-source environment, including public documentation and community contributions;
• Have experience in an organization that has made the transition from outsourcing to in-house development;
• Have an affinity for or knowledge of the fields of education and/or open science (preferred).

SURF takes pleasure in doing its recruitment itself; acquisition is therefore not appreciated.