Advancing your career — inside the Tech Department at Trulioo

The technology industry in Canada is booming, creating numerous job openings. The question is, what type of company do you want to work for? Where can you best advance your tech career and make a real impact every day? More often than not, this comes down to company culture. Culture can be difficult to describe, so we’ve produced a series of videos featuring some of our employees to give you a sneak peek of what it’s like to work at Trulioo. In this episode, we talked to Stan Trubin, a Lead Software Engineer in Test.

Tell us about yourself; what is your role at Trulioo?

My journey in the testing field started from an internship as a QA engineer. I had a minimal idea about testing back then. I had never tested software or hardware before. However, I was always curious and liked puzzles. When I was a kid, I think most of my toys (and, actually, some of our family appliances as well!) ended up being taken apart with a screwdriver. So, being curious, I just decided to give testing a try.

During the internship, I was challenged to test complex software that controlled big racks of expensive hardware devices. I liked what I was doing, so I chose software testing as my career. Over the years, I have worked on various testing projects and have written many testing automation tools.

How has your career progressed since joining Trulioo?

After relocating to Vancouver, I joined Trulioo as a Senior Software Engineer in Test to help drive quality efforts in a new development team. We took a very automation-focused approach to quality. About a year later, Trulioo recognized the success of our practice. The VP of Technology decided to expand on this success and I was promoted to lead the newly formed Automation team. The team focuses on improving automation test coverage and building new testing tools for the company.

What makes Trulioo an exciting place to join? How does the Technology department affect and impact Trulioo as a whole?

I had been looking for a company with an interesting mission. Something that would keep me challenged. Trulioo’s mission stood out to me among other startups. It is trying to solve a very novel and genuine problem of the twenty-first century — online trust. The company has a strong startup spirit and can move quickly. I also liked that the hiring manager had a quick interview process in place. The Technology department creates all existing Trulioo products, so its impact on the company can’t be underestimated. Everything that the department accomplishes makes our customers happier.

What can applicants expect to experience at different assessment stages in the interview process? Will there be technical assessments or presentations?

Typically, candidates chat with a recruiter first to discuss general interests and previous experience. Then, they have a technical phone interview. The final stage is an “in-house” interview where a potential candidate would meet several engineers and a hiring manager.

Trulioo is a SaaS company that provides global online identity verification services. To me, a great engineer is excellent at solving challenging engineering problems. During interviews, I typically ask candidates open-ended questions that have more than one solution. I usually ask hard questions. It’s not about failing candidates — I want them to succeed. But it’s about observing how candidates think about problems and how far they can get with solutions. I don’t expect perfect answers. Instead, I look forward to discussing the solutions and the pros and cons of each one.

My approach to selecting candidates to interview doesn’t depend on years in the industry. I always look at potential and previous accomplishments. For instance, last year I was looking for an intermediate-level Quality Assurance Engineer. We had a great candidate who just graduated from college. Our team was impressed by their “raw smarts” and enthusiasm, so we hired her. I only pay a bit of attention to which particular technology they know. To quote one of my mentors: “If you are a great coder in one language, you will become a great coder in another language as well.”

What is the team’s mission?

We have our own 15-second elevator pitch that describes our team mission:

“We are a team of engineers who build tools and frameworks that help engineers to evaluate software product quality — as early in the development process as possible, as quickly as possible, and with high confidence. We develop code that makes testing efficient, prevents bugs and ships better products faster.”

We are gradually working on delivering new testing tools for our engineers and fueling Trulioo’s explosive growth.

What is it like to work on the team?

The testing process is highly interconnected with other teams in our department: we are constantly in touch with developers and product managers, so we communicate with them a lot and attend shared meetings/standups. Since testing is an engineering discipline, we follow standard coding practices: we write a lot of code, we review each other’s code, we continuously look for ways to improve. We also take an occasional Friday afternoon to work on side projects.

How do you support employee development?

I give my teammates a great degree of freedom to accomplish tasks, and I encourage them to work smart. Any team at any company always has a few repetitive tasks. In my team, this could be fixing an automated test, verifying a bug fix or managing a successful code release. I give my team freedom on how to handle such tasks.

If they complete the task quickly and efficiently, the rest of the engineer’s time goes towards experiments with new technologies and implementing new automation features. Our Jira backlog of features is always full of exciting ideas and improvements.

Advance your career today

Thanks, Stan, for your deep insight! At Trulioo, we’re on a mission to verify the globe. Our identity service helps companies transform their operations and improves people’s lives. If you’re interested in a career at Trulioo, see what opportunities are available on our Careers page.