New role: Software Engineer in Tools and Infrastructure

After working on eLife's testing and deployment infrastructure in 2016, in the last year my responsibilities in the technical team have shifted towards the domain of engineering productivity. Testing is one phase of the development process that is often a bottleneck, but there are many more areas like code reviews, monitoring and infrastructure itself (being it servers or services):

In summary, the work done by the SETs naturally progressed from supporting only product testing efforts to include supporting product development efforts as well. Their role now encompassed a much broader Engineering Productivity agenda. -- Ari Shamash on the Google Testing Blog

Moreover, the team starts from a high level of coverage and design on many projects, to the point that my focus has always been on the provisioning and automation of testing environments, and on large-scale end2end testing.

What seems just a letter on a job title (from SET to SETI) is in fact an alignment of responsibilities so that I am not accidentally mistaken for "the QA guy" but always seen as a problem solver instead.

Solving problems and propagating the solution, so that you don't have to solve them over and over again

Roles are always an approximation in a team of generalizing specialist that also distributes and collaborate on some roles such as that of architecture. But it's helpful in a cross-functional team to have someone dedicated to the task of productivity, whether it is reached through automation, tooling, or continuous improvement.