Quality Assurance Engineer

Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute (Amii); Edmonton; On-site; CAD 70,000 - 110,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive compensation

Paid time off

Flexible health benefits

Job summary

Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute (Amii) is seeking a dedicated Quality Assurance Engineer to advance our engineering quality and automation efforts. You will design and maintain automated test suites, perform manual exploratory testing, and ensure robust CI/CD quality checks across internal services and external interfaces.

You will collaborate with the Director of Engineering to establish QA best practices, release verification standards, and quality metrics, while aligning testing

Qualifications

• Post-Secondary Degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related technical field.
• 2+ years of professional experience in software quality assurance, test engineering, or automated software testing.
• Hands-on experience with test automation frameworks (e.g., PyTest, Playwright, Selenium) and API testing tools (e.g., Postman) and stress-testing tools such as Locust.
• Proven track record of testing internal and external software services, ensuring functional integrity, bug prevention, and regression testing.
• Proficiency in issue tracking platforms (e.g., Jira, Slack) and bug lifecycle management.
• Experience integrating automated test runs into CI/CD pipelines (e.g., GitHub Actions).
• Solid understanding of networking protocols, load balancing, API gateways, security best practices, and database management.

Responsibilities

• Ensures all internal and external services are thoroughly tested and verified to remain unbroken across new releases and updates.
• Designs, builds, and maintains automated end-to-end, API, and unit test suites using modern test automation frameworks (Playwright, Selenium, PyTest).
• Integrates automated test suites into CI/CD pipelines to enable automated quality gates.
• Validates API contracts and data flows across internal tools and customer-facing interfaces.
• Works with SRE to conduct performance, load, and stress testing to identify bottlenecks.
• Performs pre-release verification and post-deployment validation across staging and production environments.
• Develops, executes, and maintains detailed test plans, cases, and scenarios for complex releases.
• Manages issue and bug tracking workflows with detailed steps to reproduce and clear criteria.

Skills

Test automation

CI/CD

Agile

Bug tracking

API testing

Education

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or Software Engineering

Tools

PyTest

Playwright

Selenium

Postman

Locust

GitHub Actions

Jira

Job description

"We are looking for a dedicated Quality Assurance Engineer to join our growing engineering team! This role is ideal for someone passionate about designing automated test suites, ensuring the absolute reliability of our internal and external services, and maintaining rigorous quality standards across our CI/CD pipelines. From validating complex API integrations to evaluating AI model outputs and driving bug-free releases, you'll play a vital role in keeping our systems robust and scalable. Looking forward to seeing how you'll help elevate our engineering quality!"

– Greg Burlet, Director of Engineering

About Amii

Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute (Amii) is one of Canada’s three main institutes for artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning, our world-renowned researchers drive fundamental and applied research at the University of Alberta (and other academic institutions), training some of the world’s top scientific talent. Our cross-functional teams work collaboratively with Alberta-based businesses and organizations to build AI capacity and translate scientific advancement into industry adoption and economic impact.

About the Role

The Quality Assurance (QA) Engineer plays a key role in ensuring that production applications, internal services, and user-facing platforms meet high standards of quality, reliability, and functionality. As a core technical team member, the QA Engineer collaborates closely with the Engineering product teams to establish manual and automated testing strategies, write comprehensive test plans, execute regression and performance suites, and maintain bug tracking workflows. Crucially, this role is responsible for ensuring that internal services created by the Engineering team for both intracompany and external use operate without defect and maintain rigorous service integrity.

The Quality Assurance Engineer will focus on improving product quality, test coverage, defect detection, and overall user experience across all hosted services and software products. This role spans test automation, manual exploratory testing, regression suite management, continuous integration quality checks, and issue tracking. A central purpose of the role is to guarantee that internal platforms and services developed by the Engineering team, whether serving internal Amii staff or external customers, remain robust, bug‑free, and fully functional across all deployments.

In addition to day‑to‑day testing and bug tracking, the Quality Assurance Engineer will partner with the Director, Engineering to establish QA best practices, automated testing frameworks, quality metrics, and release verification standards across the organization.

The position focuses on achieving excellence in three main accountabilities:

• Test Automation & Internal Service Integrity
• Quality Assurance & Bug Tracking Workflows
• Quality Standards & Process Excellence

Required Skills / Expertise

Key Responsibilities:

• Ensures all internal and external services created by the Engineering team are thoroughly tested and verified to remain unbroken across new releases and updates.
• Designs, builds, and maintains automated end‑to‑end, API, and unit test suites using modern test automation frameworks (e.g., Playwright, Selenium, PyTest).
• Integrates automated test suites into CI/CD deployment pipelines to enable automated quality gates and prevent defective code from reaching production environments.
• Validates API contracts, microservices integrations, and data flows across internal tools and customer‑facing interfaces.
• Works with the Site Reliability Engineer to conduct performance, load, and stress testing across web applications, databases, and internal APIs to identify scalability bottlenecks.
• Performs pre‑release verification, smoke tests and sanity checks, and post‑deployment validation across critical staging and production environments.
• Participates in sprint planning and other agile methodology ceremonies.
• Develops, executes, and maintains detailed test plans, test cases, and test scenarios for complex software releases and internal utilities.
• Manages issue and bug tracking workflows (e.g., Jira, Slack), ensuring detailed steps to reproduce, clear acceptance criteria, and accurate severity categorization.
• Performs thorough exploratory testing to discover edge‑case behavior, usability issues, and system vulnerabilities before production releases.
• Tracks, prioritizes, and verifies bug fixes in close collaboration with software developers and product owners.
• Evaluates AI and machine learning model integrations for output accuracy, edge‑case failure modes, and response consistency.
• Collaborates with product managers and software engineers to ensure feature user stories have defined quality gates and testable acceptance criteria.
• Verifies data privacy controls, permission models, and security standards across application endpoints and internal services.
• Collaborates with software engineers during sprint planning and design reviews to promote testability and defect prevention early in the development lifecycle.
• Mentors team members on quality assurance methodologies, automated testing frameworks, defect tracking standards, and testing best practices.
• Partners with the Director, Engineering to define quality metrics (e.g., code coverage, defect density, pass rates) and streamline software release processes.
• Partners with the Director, Engineering to establish long‑term technological roadmap and software development strategies.

Qualifications:

• Post‑Secondary Degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related technical field
• 2+ years of professional experience in software quality assurance, test engineering, or automated software testing
• Hands‑on experience with test automation frameworks (e.g., PyTest, Playwright, Selenium) and API testing tools (e.g., Postman) and stress‑testing tools such as Locust.
• Proven track record of testing internal and external software services, ensuring functional integrity, bug prevention, and regression testing
• Proficiency in issue tracking platforms (e.g., Jira, Slack) and bug lifecycle management
• Experience integrating automated test runs into CI/CD pipelines (e.g., GitHub Actions)
• Solid understanding of networking protocols, load balancing, API gateways, security best practices, and database management
• Experience operating in Agile environments and delivering production software in cloud infrastructure (predominantly GCP)

Attributes and Expectations:

• Advanced critical thinking and problem‑solving skills
• Strong interpersonal communication skills for effective collaboration with internal teams and external stakeholders. Operates with integrity and trust
• Passion for designing effective learning exercises, technical concept illustrations, training, and evaluation tools
• Ability to manage multiple competing priorities in a fast‑paced environment
• Demonstrates professional maturity, resourcefulness, and self‑discipline in pursuing organizational goals
• A curious mindset with a keen interest in testing new educational tools and technologies
• Shows presence, self‑confidence, sound judgment, and superior problem‑solving abilities
• Fosters high‑level cross‑functional collaboration and establishes credibility while influencing peers to achieve common goals

What you’ll love about us

• A professional yet casual work environment that encourages the growth and development of your skills.
• Gain access to the Amii community and events
• A chance to learn from amazing teammates who support one another to succeed.
• Competitive compensation, including paid time off and flexible health benefits.
• A modern office located in downtown Edmonton, Alberta.

Applicants must be legally eligible to work in Canada at the time of application.

Amii is an equal opportunity employer and values a diverse workforce. We encourage applications from all qualified individuals without regard to ethnicity, religion, gender identity, sexual orientation, age or disability. Accommodations for disability‑related needs throughout the recruitment and selection process are available upon request. Any information provided by you for accommodations will be kept confidential and won’t be used in the selection process.