ETL DB Test Engineer

Key Responsibilities

• Own end-to-end data validation for pipelines and database changes, ensuring data accuracy and reliability for downstream systems.
• Design and execute database-centric test plans for data feeds, integrations, migrations, and batch processes (incremental and full loads).
• Define and document data quality rules and validation criteria for priority datasets and flows (e.g., completeness, accuracy, referential integrity, and timeliness) and translate them into repeatable checks.
• Build and maintain reconciliation and completeness checks across sources and targets, including counts, anti-joins, key-level diffs, field-level mapping checks, and anomaly or outlier checks.
• Validate and regression-test stored procedures, functions, and triggers, including selection logic that determines which records are picked up for processing or sync, how transformations are applied, and how exceptions are generated and handled.
• Develop test cases for edge conditions, malformed or invalid data, and exception paths; validate error-handling and correction workflows.
• Validate restart and re-run safety (idempotency), including delta- or timestamp-based processing, recovery from partial failures, and safe reprocessing patterns.
• Investigate and help prevent recurring issue patterns tied to locking, deadlocks, or contention; test batching strategies and concurrency impacts and validate safe transaction handling patterns.
• Support troubleshooting with engineering and SRE using logs, monitoring, and operational signals such as job run histories, exception queues or DLQ patterns (where applicable), correlation IDs, and timestamps. • Document test approaches and results and track defects and risk in standard tooling (for example, Jira and Confluence or equivalents).
• Engage early with cross-functional teams during development to identify data risks, align on validation criteria, and provide testing guidance and reusable validation approaches that protect data integrity through releases.

Required Qualifications (Mid-to-Senior) • 7+ years in QA or data quality testing with significant database focus (or equivalent experience).

• Strong SQL skills and ability to write complex validation queries (joins, aggregations, window functions, and CTEs or temp tables).
• Demonstrated experience testing stored procedures and triggers and validating selection and transformation logic.
• Experience testing batch, ETL, ELT, or sync processes, including incremental and delta processing and reprocessing.
• Working knowledge of transactions, isolation levels, locking, and deadlocks, enough to test and diagnose issues (does not need to be a DBA).
• Ability to produce repeatable artifacts such as SQL validation scripts, reconciliation queries, checklists or runbooks, and clear defect reports with evidence.
• Strong communication skills and ability to work independently in a collaborative environment.

Preferred / Nice to Have

• Experience with SQL Server or another enterprise RDBMS (Postgres, Oracle, or MySQL), including basic execution plan reading.
• Familiarity with API testing tools and frameworks (for example, Postman and REST Assured) to validate end-to-end flows that include APIs and database changes.
• Hands-on experience with load and performance testing tools and methodologies as they relate to database workloads.
• Familiarity with CI/CD tools like Jenkins, GitHub Actions, and similar platforms.
• Familiarity with data pipeline tools (SSIS, Informatica, dbt, Airflow, Azure Data Factory, etc.).
• Experience validating data that supports reporting and analytics (data marts, dashboards).
• Scripting for automated validation checks (Python preferred; Java or similar acceptable).
• Experience participating in incident triage and post-incident corrective actions (runbooks, monitors, regression suites).