Are you passionate about solving problems and delivering next-generation software to enhance the Internet experience? Join a global leader creating software for broadband service providers. We have been growing since 1992 and now work with some of the top service providers worldwide to deliver solutions that are innovative, creative, and make life easier for millions of subscribers. We are seeking a Senior Software Test Engineer in Ontario, Canada who thrives in a fast-paced global team environment.
In this role, you will own test strategy and execution for complex, distributed software systems covering backend services, frontend UIs, APIs, and performance at scale. This is a hands-on role for someone who understands how distributed systems fail, knows where to look, and builds the automation infrastructure to catch issues before they reach production.
Role and Responsibilities
Team Leadership
- Lead, mentor, and develop a team of 5+ test engineers across varying experience levels.
- Set technical direction for the team frameworks, standards, tooling, and automation strategy.
- Manage sprint workload, priorities, and cross-team coordination across multiple concurrent projects.
- Represent the QA function in leadership discussions, sprint planning, and architectural reviews.
- Build a team culture grounded in ownership, craftsmanship, and continuous improvement.
Backend & Distributed Systems Testing
- Design and execute comprehensive test strategies for distributed, microservices-based backend systems.
- Validate system behavior under real-world conditions including network partitions, service failures, message queue backlogs, and high concurrency.
- Test message-driven and event-driven architectures (e.g. Kafka, RabbitMQ) for correctness, ordering guarantees, and failure recovery.
- Validate data consistency, idempotency, and correctness across distributed components and databases.
- Build and maintain backend service integration and contract tests.
Frontend Testing
- Design and maintain automated UI test suites for web-based applications using tools such as Playwright, Cypress, or Selenium.
- Ensure cross-browser and cross-platform coverage with maintainable, reliable test scripts.
- Collaborate with frontend developers to embed testing early in the development cycle.
Performance & Load Testing
- Own performance testing strategy designing, executing, and analyzing load, stress, soak, and spike tests.
- Identify bottlenecks at the service, database, and infrastructure level and work with engineering teams to address them.
- Define performance baselines and SLAs, and build automated regression checks around them.
- Use tools such as JMeter, Gatling, k6, or Locust to simulate realistic production traffic patterns.
CI/CD & Automation
- Integrate test suites into CI/CD pipelines to enable continuous quality feedback.
- Build scalable, maintainable automation frameworks aligned with engineering best practices.
- Conduct peer code reviews for test code and enforce quality standards across the team.
- Investigate, triage, and resolve test failures — distinguishing flaky tests from real defects.
Collaboration & Quality Culture
- Partner closely with developers, architects, and product teams to understand requirements and surface quality risks early.
- Participate in sprint planning, architecture reviews, and design discussions as the quality voice.
- Produce clear test reports, metrics, and findings for both technical and non-technical audiences.
- Continuously improve test coverage, tooling, and processes.
Qualifications
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent experience.
- 5+ years of hands-on experience in software testing, with strong coverage of both backend and frontend systems
- 2+ years leading or mentoring a QA team, with direct experience managing 5+ engineers preferred.
- Proven experience testing distributed systems microservices, event-driven architectures, or message brokers.
- Proficiency in UI automation using Playwright, Cypress, Selenium, or equivalent.
- Strong programming skills in Python, Java, or JavaScript able to write production-quality test code.
- Experience with API testing tools such as Postman, REST Assured, or similar.
- Solid experience with performance and load testing tools (k6, JMeter, Gatling, Locust, or similar).
- Understanding of distributed systems concepts: CAP theorem, eventual consistency, retry logic, circuit breakers, timeouts.
- Experience working in Linux/Unix environments.
- Familiarity with CI/CD platforms such as Jenkins, GitHub Actions, or GitLab CI.
- Strong analytical mindset with attention to edge cases, failure modes, and non-obvious system interactions.
- Experience with containerized environments (Docker, Kubernetes) is a strong asset.
- Familiarity with observability tooling (logs, metrics, tracing) to support test investigation.
- This is a fully remote role, with the candidate working out of their home office in Ontario, Canada
- The salary range for this role is 80-95,000 CAD