BLACK OPS SOLUTIONS · IT Graduate IT Interview PackAU · 2026

QA / Test Engineer · graduate level · Australia

Graduate QA Engineer

Finds the defect before a customer does, and can prove it in a way a developer can act on.

Job description · fictional employer

Graduate QA Engineer

Bluegum Software

Location
Adelaide - hybrid, 3 days in office
Employment type
Full-time, permanent - 12-month structured graduate program
Salary
AUD $72,000 base + 12% superannuation
Reports to
QA Lead, Workforce Products
Intake
February 2027 - applications close 9 October 2026

About us

Bluegum Software builds payroll and workforce management software used by 40 local councils, three health services and a state ambulance service. About 90,000 people are paid through our software each fortnight. When we get an award interpretation wrong, somebody's rent is short, and we hear about it by 7am.

The team you would join

Quality Engineering is nine people embedded across four product squads. You would join Workforce Products with two other testers, six developers and a product manager. We do not have a separate testing phase at the end - testers are in refinement, arguing about acceptance criteria before anything is built.

What you will do

  • Test features before release through structured exploratory sessions, not only by running a script somebody wrote last year
  • Write and maintain automated regression tests in Playwright and TypeScript
  • Take ownership of the test coverage for one product area by around month six
  • Reproduce and triage customer-reported defects down to a minimal, reliable reproduction
  • Challenge acceptance criteria in refinement, which is far cheaper than finding the same problem in test
  • Investigate nightly regression failures rather than re-running until they pass
  • Test award and rate changes against known payroll scenarios where an error costs a real person real money
  • Keep the test data sets current, which is the least glamorous and most load-bearing job on the team

What we are looking for

  • A completed or in-progress bachelor degree in IT, computer science, software engineering or a related discipline, graduating between November 2025 and December 2026
  • The instinct to break things, paired with the discipline to write down exactly how you broke them
  • Enough programming to read a pull request and write a straightforward automated test - any language
  • Writing clear enough that a developer can act on your defect report without a conversation
  • The nerve to say something is not ready to people who want it shipped today
  • Full Australian working rights for the duration of the program

Nice to have

  • Any test automation, in any framework, including one you wrote for a university project
  • API testing with Postman or similar, and enough SQL to check the database behind the screen
  • Exposure to accessibility testing
  • ISTQB Foundation, or evidence you have read seriously about testing
  • A part-time job where being calm under pressure was the whole role

What you would work in

Playwright + TypeScriptJestPostmanAzure DevOpsSQL ServerBrowserStackaxe DevToolsk6 (basic)Git

What the program gives you

  • A mentor from the QE practice and a buddy in your squad for the first month
  • Paid ISTQB Foundation certification with study leave, and a serious reading list that is not just the syllabus
  • A six-week rotation embedded with the developers, writing production code under review
  • $2,000 annual learning budget and a fortnightly quality guild where defects that escaped are pulled apart without blame
  • Promotion to QA Engineer (Level 2) after twelve months, subject to review

How the process runs

  1. 1

    Application

    CV plus three short written questions. No cover letter.

  2. 2

    Online assessment

    40 minutes - find the problems in a short specification, plus logical reasoning.

  3. 3

    Talent screen

    30-minute call - motivation, logistics, working rights.

  4. 4

    Testing exercise

    45 minutes on a small web application we host, followed by a discussion of what you found and what you skipped.

  5. 5

    Panel

    45 minutes with the QA lead and a developer - collaboration, defect advocacy, how you handle being wrong.

Testing is a career here, not a waiting room for a development role. If you meet most of the essential criteria and none of the desirable ones, apply anyway. Reasonable adjustments are available at any stage of the process - tell your talent partner what you need.

Example CV · fictional candidate

Sophie Bennett

Written to the job description on the previous tab. Notes on the right explain each choice.

Sophie Bennett

Graduate QA Engineer

Adelaide SA · 0400 000 000 · [email protected] · github.com/sophiebennett-qa · linkedin.com/in/sophie-bennett-qa

Professional summary

IT graduate with a twelve-week QA internship on a regulated product, a habit of writing reproductions people can actually follow, and enough TypeScript to maintain a Playwright suite rather than only run one. I would rather report three defects that get fixed than thirty that get triaged into a backlog nobody reads.

Technical skills
Test design
Boundary and equivalence analysis, risk-based prioritisation, exploratory charters, test data design
Automation
Playwright with TypeScript, Jest, Postman collections, GitHub Actions and Azure Pipelines (running and reading them)
Technical
TypeScript and JavaScript, Python (basic), SQL - joins and aggregates for verifying what the screen shows
Accessibility
Keyboard-only testing, axe DevTools, NVDA (basic screen reader navigation)
Tools
Azure DevOps test plans, Jira, BrowserStack, Chrome DevTools network and console
Ways of working
Refinement participation, defect triage, release readiness reporting
Education
Bachelor of Information Technology (Software Development)
Feb 2023 - Nov 2026

University of South Australia

  • Credit average, with distinctions in Software Quality and Testing, Web Development and Databases
  • Relevant units: Software Quality and Testing, Systems Analysis, Databases, Web Development, Human-Computer Interaction
  • Final project: an automated regression suite for a student-built booking app. See Projects below
Experience
Quality Assurance Intern
Nov 2025 - Feb 2026 (12-week vacation program)

Torrens Digital, Adelaide

  • Tested three releases of a rostering product used by two aged care providers, raising 47 defects of which 41 were accepted and fixed
  • Found a rounding error in overtime calculation that would have underpaid part-time staff by up to $18 a fortnight, from a boundary case nobody had scripted
  • Wrote 22 Playwright tests covering the login and roster publication paths, cutting about 90 minutes of manual regression per release
  • Rewrote the defect template after tracking that a third of reports were being sent back for missing environment details
Shift Supervisor (part-time, 18 hrs/week)
Mar 2023 - Dec 2025

Hindley Street Dining Co, Adelaide

  • Ran Friday and Saturday service with up to seven staff, in a job where staying calm and prioritising is the entire skill
  • Trained eleven new staff and wrote the opening and closing checklists still in use
Peer Tutor, Programming Fundamentals
Mar 2025 - present

University of South Australia

  • Weekly sessions for first-year students, mostly spent teaching people to read an error message before changing code
  • Consistently rated above 4.5 / 5 in student feedback
Projects
Regression suite for a student booking app (final year project)
Playwright, TypeScript, GitHub Actions
  • 38 tests across three layers, run on every pull request, with a deliberate ratio of API to end-to-end tests
  • Two tests were deleted rather than stabilised, and the write-up explains why that was the right call
  • github.com/sophiebennett-qa/booking-regression
Open source defect reports
Written reproductions, three projects
  • Six issues raised against open-source libraries with minimal reproductions; four were fixed and two were closed as by design, which I also learned from
  • Linked from my GitHub profile as writing samples, because a defect report is the artefact this job actually produces
Accessibility audit - university club website
axe DevTools, NVDA, keyboard-only testing
  • Found 14 issues, of which only 5 were detected by the automated scanner
  • Fixed the focus order and form labels myself and wrote a one-page guide for the committee
Leadership and activities
  • Volunteer test coordinator, university hackathon 2025 - ran a bug bash across nine student teams on the final afternoon
  • Member, Adelaide software testing meetup, since 2024. Gave a five-minute lightning talk on flaky tests in 2025
  • Trained eleven hospitality staff, which is where I learned to write instructions people follow
Certifications
  • ISTQB Certified Tester Foundation Level, February 2026
  • Microsoft AZ-900: Azure Fundamentals, September 2025
Referees

Available on request.