Jacob Thibault
Verified Expert in Engineering
Quality Assurance Developer
Amsterdam, Netherlands
Toptal member since June 16, 2020
Jacob is a seasoned QA engineer, software developer, and team leader with extensive industry experience. He specializes in the design and implementation of automated testing frameworks. His career began as a test engineer at Verizon Wireless. Since then, he has led QA organizations at AI music startup Amper Music, DigiB, and Amsterdam Platform Creation. Jacob is currently developing tools and frameworks to improve quality as a senior SDET at an online supermarket, Picnic Technologies.
Portfolio
Experience
- Quality Assurance (QA) - 12 years
- Software Testing - 12 years
- Telecommunications - 12 years
- Python - 10 years
- Automated Testing - 10 years
- Selenium - 10 years
- API Testing - 10 years
- Jira - 8 years
Availability
Preferred Environment
Python, Appium
The most amazing...
...project I've participated in as a QA engineer was launching a successful product: transforming ideas on paper into a tool that people use is rewarding.
Work Experience
Tech Lead
Picnic Technologies
- Acted as a founding member of the QA platform team, focused on tools development and quality engineering enablement.
- Advocated for shift-left principles and increased quality gates by mixing execution and outreach.
- Led a team of QA engineers and SDETs in support of a flagship mobile application.
Principal QA Engineer and Team Lead
Amsterdam Platform Creation
- Established the QA automation framework from scratch for many RESTful web services and mobile applications.
- Led recruitment and training of new QA engineers joining the company.
- Conducted code reviews and supported the growth and training of junior team members.
Test Chapter Lead
DigiB
- Mentored test engineers and led the testing team for high-priority projects.
- Architected and developed automated testing solutions using various technologies and approaches.
- Acted as a liaison between members of the test organization and other teams.
Quality Assurance Lead
Amper Music
- Established quality assurance as a discipline upon arrival at Amper, quickly increasing order and structure to the software development lifecycle. Improved the robustness of the code and decreased the flow of bugs to production.
- Directly supported the launches of Amper Music's flagship application, Amper Score, and Amper's core API in late 2018.
- Managed all QA operations for Amper Score, Amper's core API, and various microservices they rely on while concurrently developing and maintaining an automated test environment and codebase to further support those test activities.
- Drove product improvement by providing user-focused feedback ahead of new feature development.
- Implemented automated testing solutions for web UI and API products.
Member of Technical Staff
Verizon Wireless
- Supported hundreds of successful new device launches and their operating system software updates by managing the testing of dozens of pre-loaded applications.
- Supported launch of several network features through field testing, including VoLTE (voice over LTE), Vo-Wi-Fi (voice over Wi-Fi), eMBMS (multi-cast feature), and others.
- Supported successful launch and updates of Verizon's Visual Voicemail 3 platform and third-party application implementation across dozens of OEMs, such as Samsung, Motorola, HTC, and LG.
- Developed test procedures for new products from requirements documentation.
- Led day-to-day pre-commercial and post-launch mobile device application testing operations.
- Analyzed and scrutinized test results for validity and reproducibility.
- Wholly and accurately reported valid issues through established channels of escalation.
- Executed iterative end-to-end testing of new products, highlighting showstopper issues.
- Interfaced with product SMEs to provide go/no-go recommendations for the product launch.
- Developed automated test scripts for regression testing.
Experience
Amper Score
Education
Master of Science Degree in Computer Science
Stevens Institute of Technology - Hoboken, NJ, United States
Bachelor of Engineering Degree in Electrical Engineering
Stevens Institute of Technology - Hoboken, NJ, United States
Skills
Libraries/APIs
REST APIs
Tools
Jira, Postman, Mocha, Cucumber, WebdriverIO, Android Debug Bridge, Jenkins, Terraform, TeamCity
Paradigms
Software Testing, Manual Testing, Automated Testing, Behavior-driven Development (BDD), REST
Languages
Python, JavaScript, TypeScript
Frameworks
Selenium, Appium, Cypress
Industry Expertise
Telecommunications
Platforms
Spinnaker
Storage
Datadog
Other
QA Test Plan Management, Quality Assurance (QA), UI Testing, Integration Testing, Manual QA, Regression Testing, Web-based Testing, Mobile App Testing, Web App Testing, Android Testing, API Testing, Automated UI Testing, QA Automation, APIs
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