Quality Engineer (Compute Solutions)

About Nexcess

Nexcess provides specialty cloud solutions for organizations where performance and compliance have to coexist. We serve businesses worldwide, from agencies scaling client sites to enterprises running mission-critical operations. We've built our reputation on deep technical expertise and genuine partnership with every client we work with. Behind every environment we manage is a team of people who take the craft seriously and keep showing up when it matters.

Overview

Compute Solutions builds and operates the VPS, Cloud Dedicated, storage, and bare metal products our customers run their cloud infrastructure on.

You will own quality end to end: from specification and test strategy through automation, verification, and production behavior.

The pull request is the visible part. The job is the machine behind it: turning a loosely worded need into something precise enough to build against, naming what can break before it does, proving the change is correct rather than asserting it, and staying with it once it is live.

How we work

Business alignment and focus come first. Engineering here exists to move the business, not to be busy. You will know which few things matter most this month and why, say so when the work in front of you is not one of them, and land what you committed to on dates the business can plan around, at a quality that does not come back as an incident or a customer escalation. Predictable, reliable delivery of quality software is the output of this job, and everything below is in service of it.

This job gets more hands-on every quarter, not less. The volume of code goes up while the time you spend typing it goes down, so the value moves to the two ends of it: what you specify, and what you verify. You will stay close to production, run the AI harness daily, read code you did not write, and keep your technical judgment current rather than remembered.

Whoever ships it owns it, regardless of what wrote it. Most code is AI-generated now, so the judgment moved to either side of it: specifying exactly what to build, and verifying that what came back is correct, secure and operable. An agent wrote it is not a defense. Your name is on the merge.

You do not need to own the roadmap to know why the work matters. You will not be the Product counterpart at this level and you are not expected to be. You are expected to understand what the customer gets and what the business gains from the thing you are building, and to ask before you build the wrong thing correctly. The engineers who move fastest here are the ones who ask that question early rather than at the review.

You go on call for what you build, and you take your turn on the rotation. Engineering declares risk and timelines in writing for the business to accept, and that includes yours: when a date is at risk you say so early, with evidence, rather than quietly.

Responsibilities

• Own quality end to end within the Compute Solutions domain. Take responsibility for how changes across VPS, Cloud Dedicated, storage, and bare metal products are validated from specification through development, deployment, and production.
• Build and maintain automated testing frameworks and test coverage. Develop reliable automated tests for infrastructure and application changes, including regression, integration, and failure-path scenarios.
• Define testing strategy early in the development process. Identify risks, dependencies, edge cases, and operational failure scenarios before implementation is complete.
• Translate requirements into clear and testable acceptance criteria. Work with engineers and stakeholders to remove ambiguity and ensure expected behavior can be verified objectively.
• Validate changes across complex infrastructure environments. Test interactions between compute, virtualization, storage, networking, and supporting software components.
• Verify changes and provide evidence. Ensure pull requests include meaningful test results, coverage, and validation of both expected behavior and failure scenarios.
• Use AI-assisted engineering tools as part of your daily workflow. Apply agentic tooling to testing, automation, and review while critically validating generated output and remaining accountable for the final result.
• Review code and test changes from other engineers. Identify quality, reliability, and operational risks early and provide clear, actionable feedback.
• Improve testing efficiency and reduce manual effort. Identify repetitive validation work and replace it with reliable automation wherever practical.
• Support production quality. Participate in incident analysis, identify gaps in test coverage, and ensure production issues result in improvements to automated testing and engineering practices.
• Work across existing and unfamiliar systems. Understand complex or legacy infrastructure and develop effective test coverage without requiring unnecessary rewrites.
• Mentor other engineers in quality practices. Share testing approaches, automation techniques, and quality standards across the team.
• Coordinate quality dependencies across teams. Identify integration risks early and work directly with the relevant engineers to ensure cross-team changes are tested appropriately.

Qualifications

Required

• 5+ years of experience with automated testing frameworks and software quality engineering.
• Strong experience designing, building, and maintaining automated test suites for production systems.
• Experience testing complex environments involving multiple infrastructure or application components.
• Strong understanding of software testing principles, including functional, integration, regression, and failure-path testing.
• Experience defining test strategies and translating requirements into clear, testable acceptance criteria.
• Experience working closely with engineers throughout the development lifecycle rather than testing only after development is complete.
• Ability to read and understand application or infrastructure code well enough to identify risks, test gaps, and potential defects.
• Experience with production systems and incident analysis, including using production issues to improve test coverage.
• Hands-on experience with AI-assisted engineering or testing tools as part of day-to-day technical work.
• Strong written communication skills and the ability to work effectively in a remote, distributed team across multiple time zones.

Preferred

• 5+ years of experience with KVM or Linux server administration.
• Experience with one or more of the following technologies: Perl, PHP, React, or Vue.
• Experience testing virtualization, VPS, bare metal, storage, or cloud infrastructure.
• Experience in managed hosting, cloud platforms, or another high-availability service environment.
• Experience with CI/CD-integrated automated testing.
• Experience mentoring engineers or helping establish quality and testing standards across a team.

What you will do

• Own features end to end inside your team's domain. Work that runs for weeks, touches several parts of the system and other people's code, and ends in a live, monitored change. This is the rung where the work stops arriving pre-broken-down: you are the one who names the unknowns up front rather than discovering them late.
• Write the specification before the code. Most of the leverage sits upstream of the keyboard. Turn a request into something precise enough that an agent, or another engineer, builds the right thing the first time, and resolve the ambiguity in writing with the person who asked.
• Run the AI harness every day. Agentic tooling as the default way you work, automated review in the pull-request path, and reusable skills you build and share with the team rather than leave on your own laptop.
• Verify, and put the evidence on the pull request. Tests with every change, coverage gating on changed code, the failure cases exercised and not only the happy path. A reviewer should not have to take your word for it.
• Make your reviews worth having. With no authority, review is where most of your influence lands: catch the design problem while it is still cheap to fix, be specific about what to change and why, and be fast. Review latency slows the whole team down and yours is part of it.
• Mentor the engineers earlier on the ladder. Pair on the hard changes, explain the reasoning and not just the fix, and give feedback directly and early. You lead through design, code and review, not through a reporting line.
• Own what you run, not only what you ship. On call for your team's services, incidents written up with actions closed on dates, toil removed rather than absorbed, and whatever only you know written down so no bus factor of one is left standing.
• Work in the code you did not write. A hosting platform carries years of history. You will read your way into unfamiliar parts of it, change them safely without a rewrite you cannot justify, and leave each one better instrumented than you found it.
• Clear what you need from another team yourself. Find the dependency early, agree it directly with the engineer who owns it, and land it ahead of your work rather than escalating once it is late.

What we require

• 5+ years in software engineering, building and running production software, with real ownership of what you shipped after it shipped.
• Depth in at least one part of a production system, and the ability to read your way into a part you have never seen. You can read a diff in a language you do not use daily and say what is wrong with it.
• Hands-on AI-assisted engineering, in your daily work rather than a trial. You can specify precisely, review generated code critically, and tell us where it fails and what you always check before it merges.
• Tests and evidence as a habit rather than a mandate. You write them as you go, you gate on changed code, and you have caught your own mistakes with them.
• You have operated what you built. A production on-call rotation, an incident you owned, and a write-up that changed something afterwards.
• Clear written communication in a remote, distributed team. Decisions and trade-offs recorded in writing, with colleagues across several time zones.
• Managed hosting, cloud or another high-availability service business is a bonus.

Location: Slovakia

Employment type: Permanent, Full-time

Pay Range: $82,000

What We Offer

• work in a team of professionals at international level;
• opportunity to practice and improve your English;
• excellent pay and all necessary equipment;
• remote work with the possibility to use our co-working spacein Bratislava;
• employee referral program with bonuses for successful referrals;

Disclaimer:

This job description is only a summary of the typical functions of the position. It is not intended to be an exhaustive or comprehensive list of all job responsibilities, tasks, or duties. Additional duties and tasks may be assigned as part of the job function. Nexcess reserves the right to modify, interpret, or apply this job description in a way that best supports the organizational needs. The job description in no way creates or implies an employment contract. The employment contract remains “at will”.

Equal Employment Opportunity Policy:

Nexcess is committed to offering equal employment opportunity without regard to age, color, disability, gender, gender identity, genetic information, marital status, military status, national origin, race, religion, sexual orientation, veteran status, or any other legally protected characteristic.