Senior QA Engineer in Mississauga

We are hiring a Senior QA Manager for an onsite assignment at our client's premises in Canada, owning QA leadership across multiple product streams. You will own end-to-end test strategy — manual and automated, across web, mobile, API and emerging surfaces — coordinate distributed QA engineers across India, Canada and elsewhere, and be the credible face of quality with the client's leadership. Deep hands-on testing craft, excellent scripting, and confident direct client communication are essential. This role is AI-first by design: you and your team will use modern AI-augmented testing tools to raise coverage, velocity and defect discovery.

WHAT YOU'LL DO

• Test strategy & quality governance across products
• Own the multi-product test strategy — functional, regression, exploratory and non-functional (performance, security, accessibility, resilience) — aligned to release cadence and risk profile.
• Set and enforce quality gates, entry/exit criteria, coverage targets, and quality metrics that drive behaviour (escape rate, defect density, first-time-pass, MTTR).
• Own test-data and environment strategy, and compliance testing where relevant (PIPEDA, WCAG 2.2 AA, Ontario AODA, Quebec Law 25).
• Stay hands-on — design frameworks, review test code, model complex scenarios, and mentor by example rather than by ticket.
• API and contract testing (Postman REST Assured Karate Pact); performance (k6 JMeter Gatling); accessibility (axe-core); visual regression (Applitools Percy).
• Drive AI-augmented testing as the default posture — self-healing frameworks (Mabl Testim Applitools Eyes), LLM-assisted test generation (Copilot / Claude / Cursor), automated triage of logs and failures.
• Own the quality of AI features in the products — prompt tests, red-teaming, guardrail and PII validation, and LLM-eval pipelines in CI (Braintrust Langfuse Ragas DeepEval Promptfoo).
• Lead QA engineers across India, Canada and elsewhere; run planning, standups, reviews and retros designed to work across 8–10-hour gaps.
• Be the onsite quality leader at the client's premises across multiple product streams — attend client ceremonies, present QA plans and outcomes to client leadership, and run incident post-mortems.
• Coordinate cross-product delivery with client PMs, dev leads, security and operations; handle escalations calmly and decisively.
• Bridge offshore delivery to onsite expectation — protect the offshore team from context whiplash and the client from delivery surprises.

YOU ARE

• A deep thinker who reasons from fundamentals, challenges assumptions constructively, and separates root cause from symptom under pressure.
• Hands-on by choice — you would rather write a Playwright helper or triage a flaky test than delegate it away.
• AI-fluent, responsibly — pushes the team toward AI-first automation while safeguarding correctness, security, data-protection and IP.
• A calm client-facing leader — trusted by client executives to say “yes we ship” or “no we do not” with reasoning that stands up.
• A quiet standard-setter — engineers across time zones read your test plans and reviews to learn what good looks like.
• A seasoned leader with a track record of building and scaling QA functions across multiple product lines and geographies.
• Culturally adaptable — comfortable being the sole visible onsite presence of the delivery team at the client for months at a time.
• High ownership, professionalism, and work ethics.

ESSENTIAL SKILLS

• Test-strategy leadership — multi-product, multi-release, risk-based; entry/exit criteria, quality gates, and metrics that drive behaviour.
• Non-functional depth — performance (k6 JMeter Gatling), accessibility (WCAG 2.2, axe-core), security-testing basics (OWASP ZAP, SAST/DAST triage).
• CI/CD-integrated testing on Azure DevOps Pipelines (or GitHub Actions / Jenkins); test reporting (Allure ReportPortal).
• Distributed-team leadership — planning, ceremonies, mentoring, and performance across India, Canada and beyond.
• Direct client engagement — running planning meetings, demos, RCAs and escalations with senior Canadian stakeholders.
• AI-first testing judgment — self-healing tools, LLM-assisted authoring, and evals for AI features embedded in the products.
• Exceptional English communication — verbal and written — and a confident onsite executive presence.

HIGHLY DESIRABLE

• ISTQB Advanced (Test Manager / Test Automation Engineer) or equivalent certification.
• Prior onsite delivery experience in Canada or North America; working understanding of PIPEDA and provincial privacy regimes (Ontario, Quebec Law 25).
• Chaos / resilience testing (Gremlin Chaos Mesh) and production observability signals (Application Insights Datadog New Relic).
• Testing experience across web, mobile-native and API surfaces of the same product line.
• Exposure to Azure AI Foundry agent evaluation, and to LLM red-teaming tools (Lakera Robust Intelligence).
• Prior experience establishing a QA Centre of Excellence or Community of Practice.
• Bilingual English / French is a strong asset for Quebec-facing engagements.

REQUIREMENTS

• Bachelor of Engineering / Technology in Computer Science, Information Technology or an equivalent discipline.
• ISTQB Advanced or equivalent is a strong plus.
• 10+ years of hands-on QA experience with at least 5 years in a QA leadership / management role owning multi-product strategy and distributed teams.
• Currently authorised to work in Canada and physically based in Canada for onsite client engagement.
• Direct client-facing communication with Canadian stakeholders is a core part of the role.