QA Strategist

Blue J Legal; Toronto; Hybrid; CAD 120,000 - 135,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Flexible hybrid environment

Competitive salary and equity

Thoughtful benefits package

Leadership opportunity

Collaborative culture

Job summary

Blue J is seeking a QA Strategist to shape quality from discovery to production for its AI-powered tax products. You will collaborate with Engineering, Product, and Customer teams to design meaningful tests and ensure confidence in releases.

The role emphasizes proactive discovery, robust test design, and building lightweight QA tooling. A strong background in data-driven QA and production code familiarity is essential, with a focus on delivering reliable software in a fast-growing company.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of experience in a quality-focused role.
• A technical background: you understand how software systems function beyond test cases, are comfortable reading and debugging production code, and enjoy writing maintainable tools to automate QA tasks and aid testing efforts.
• Data spelunking proficiency: you can write scrappy scripts or queries to crunch millions of rows of SQL to find insidious anomalies or other needles in a haystack.
• A sense of ownership: you take initiative, work on the highest-impact tasks first, and can manage your own priorities with ease.
• Strong written and oral communication: you can reason through a high-stakes problem calmly, speak the language of any cross-functional stakeholders, and document findings clearly and concisely.
• A user-first mindset: you think in terms of product impact, not just technical correctness.

Responsibilities

• Advocating for the end user in discovery, planning, and design work, surfacing unknowns, clarifying requirements, and identifying use cases others miss.
• Collaborating with Product and internal domain experts to devise test scenarios that align with real-world user problems.
• Identifying measures of success and using modern tools to ensure our system remains observable, debuggable, and provides actionable insights.
• Leading exploratory and regression testing for new features, tailored to the risks of each release.
• Investigating bugs and user feedback, and working with developers to identify root causes and develop solutions.
• Writing lightweight tools to support testing workflows, and occasionally fixing bugs in production code.
• Coaching and enabling developers, creating a multiplier effect where you’re mainly consulted on novel problems rather than acting as a safety net.

Skills

QA experience

Production code reading

SQL queries

Ownership

Communication

User focus

Tools

Node.js

TypeScript

Python

LLM APIs

AWS

Terraform

Kubernetes

Docker

PostgreSQL

ElasticSearch

DynamoDB

S3

Kafka

NATS

SNS/SQS

Job description

About Blue J

Blue J is the leading generative AI solution for tax professionals and one of Canada's fastest-growing AI companies. Headquartered in Toronto, we're a high-growth B2B SaaS company building industry-leading tax research software that helps accountants find accurate answers to complex tax questions with greater speed and confidence.

Backed by a $122M USD Series D funding round, we're scaling rapidly across North America and the UK while continuing to push the boundaries of what's possible with AI. By combining advanced technology with deep tax expertise, we empower tax professionals to work more efficiently, make better decisions, and deliver greater value to their clients.

A Note on Location

Fully remote, but you must live within driving distance of our Toronto office. You’ll join us in person for every quarterly and occasionally for team get-togethers (typically 1–3 visits per quarter). All candidates must be eligible to work in Canada.

To help you get off to a great start, we bring all new team members together for their first three days of onboarding. If you’re based outside of our local commuting area, Blue J will arrange and cover your travel and accommodation.

The Opportunity

Blue J’s Content Pillar team builds the systems that turn complex, varied source material into accurate, up-to-date content for our AI-powered tax products. Our work spans the entire data pipeline, from initial content ingestion, to near-realtime indexing, to retrieval by RAG algorithms, along with the tools that help our Legal Research team apply their domain expertise effectively.

We’re looking for a QA Strategist to shape how we build quality into the product, from initial specification through to production. This isn’t a rote testing role. You’ll apply systems thinking to explore features, help define requirements, test the boundaries of LLM-backed systems, and write or review code where needed. Working across Engineering, Product, and Customer teams, you’ll uncover blind spots early and help the team ship with confidence.

We’re looking for someone who’s technically sharp, curious, and has a bias towards action. You’ll uncover blind spots, think holistically about user experience, and help the team build and ship with confidence.

What You’ll be Doing

Shaping work before it’s built

• Advocating for the end user in discovery, planning, and design work, surfacing unknowns, clarifying requirements, and identifying use cases others miss
• Collaborating with Product and internal domain experts to devise test scenarios that align with real-world user problems
• Identifying measures of success and using modern tools to ensure our system remains observable, debuggable, and provides actionable insights

Ensuring confident delivery of software that will delight customers

• Leading exploratory and regression testing for new features, tailored to the risks of each release
• Investigating bugs and user feedback, and working with developers to identify root causes and develop solutions
• Writing lightweight tools to support testing workflows, and occasionally fixing bugs in production code

Raising the quality bar across the Engineering organization

• Coaching and enabling developers, creating a multiplier effect where you’re mainly consulted on novel problems rather than acting as a safety net
• Expanding our LLM evaluation tools to help us gain confidence in algorithmic improvements, learning from production system metrics rather than gut feel
• Collaborating with QA peers and developers across pillars to identify and solve systemic issues, including problems that are non-deterministic or have infinite surface area

What You Offer Blue J

• 5+ years of experience in a quality-focused role
• A technical background: you understand how software systems function beyond test cases, are comfortable reading and debugging production code, and enjoy writing maintainable tools to automate QA tasks and aid testing efforts
• Data spelunking proficiency: you can write scrappy scripts or queries to crunch millions of rows of SQL to find insidious anomalies or other needles in a haystack
• A sense of ownership: you take initiative, work on the highest-impact tasks first, and can manage your own priorities with ease
• Strong written and oral communication: you can reason through a high-stakes problem calmly, speak the language of any cross-functional stakeholders, and document findings clearly and concisely
• A user-first mindset: you think in terms of product impact, not just technical correctness

Additional Experience That Would Be Valuable

• Experience working on data pipelines at scale, especially in combination with RAG systems
• Experience with ingestion systems that can handle heterogeneous data, both trusted and untrusted
• Experience with fault-tolerant, resilient, event-driven distributed systems
• Experience in high-growth startups/scaleups or agile environments
• Interest in LLMs, prompt evaluation, and the unique challenges inherent to generative AI systems

Technologies You Can Expect To Work With

These may evolve as our platform grows. Technologies currently in use include:

• Node.js, TypeScript, Python
• LLM APIs and accompanying evaluation frameworks
• AWS, Terraform, Kubernetes, Docker
• Datadog, Sentry, Mixpanel
• GitHub, CircleCI
• PostgreSQL, ElasticSearch, DynamoDB, S3
• Kafka, NATS, SNS/SQS

What We Offer You

• A meaningful informal leadership role shaping how we confidently ship code at a fast growing company
• A flexible hybrid environment with the option to work remotely most of the time
• Competitive salary and equity compensation
• A thoughtful benefits package that supports you and your family
• A team that values collaboration, kindness, high standards, and continuous learning
• A culture where quality, lean iteration, and thoughtful system design are core engineering principles
• An environment where your work directly accelerates innovation in a rapidly evolving market

The Core Values that Define Our Culture

• We are customer-focused
• We put team over self
• We are pleasant and playful
• We are open to better ideas
• We move fast and fix things

What to Expect in the Interview Process

We anticipate a high volume of applicants for this role and are excited to grow our team. A human will review each application and get back to you as soon as possible. We appreciate your patience and look forward to connecting with you!

Interview Process

• Chat with our Sr Talent Acquisition Manager, Nancy Nguyen
• Meet with the Content Platform’s Director of Engineering, Cam Sapp
• Connect with a prospective QA peer for a technical exercise
• Meet the team
• Meet with our CEO, Ben

We believe our strength is built on diversity of thought, and encourage candidates from all backgrounds and experiences to apply. We value inclusiveness and are an equal opportunity employer. We do not discriminate based on race, religion, colour, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status.

We strive to create an inclusive and accessible hiring experience for all candidates. If you need any accommodations during the interview process, please let us know in your application. Our team is dedicated to providing the necessary support and making reasonable adjustments to ensure a smooth process for everyone.

How We Use AI in Our Hiring Process

To ensure transparency, we want candidates to know that Blue J uses AI-enabled tools within our applicant tracking system to help organize applications and highlight profiles that match the key requirements for each role.

AI does not make hiring decisions.

Every application is reviewed by a member of our Talent team, and all decisions throughout the process are made by humans.

We use these tools to support efficiency and consistency, not to replace human judgment and we’re committed to a fair, thoughtful, and equitable experience for every candidate.

Compensation

The base pay range for this role is $120,000 to $135,000 CAD per year.

This is a Level 3 in Blue J’s career level framework. We use levels to define the expected scope, autonomy, impact, decision-making, and experience for each role. Final compensation will be set fairly and thoughtfully based on experience, expertise, and alignment with the role’s responsibilities. While all candidates are expected to bring directly relevant experience, the top of the range is typically reserved for individuals who demonstrate exceptional depth in the role’s core competencies, a strong track record of impact in similar environments, and the ability to operate with a high degree of autonomy from day one.