Senior Quality Engineering Lead - API & AI Automation

Vancity; Toronto; Hybrid; CAD 113,000 - 153,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Living Wage Employer

Top Employer recognition

Flexible benefits

Generous vacation

Health coverage

Pension

Job summary

Vancity is seeking an Engineering Lead, Quality to steer quality engineering across member‑facing platforms. You will lead hands‑on engineering, build scalable automation, and drive API‑first testing with AI‑driven approaches.

This full‑time, permanent role is based at the Vancity head office with hybrid work; on‑site presence may be required for events. You will partner with product and engineering to embed quality, design data‑driven validation, and contribute to CI/CD feedback loops.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of experience in software engineering, quality engineering, or related field.
• Experience operating as a senior technical contributor or SDET.
• Proven experience designing and building and evolving automation frameworks (not just using them).
• Deep experience in API‑first testing and reducing reliance on UI‑based automation.
• Experience with AI‑powered testing or test generation: LLMs, agentic and spec‑driven automation.
• Experience integrating test automation into CI/CD pipelines.
• Strong experience in automated NFR validation.
• Experience with scalable API automation frameworks (REST, event‑driven systems).
• Hands‑on experience with tools like Playwright, Cypress, Postman, or equivalent.
• Experience with distributed systems and microservices architectures.
• Familiarity with AWS or Azure, containers (Docker/Kubernetes).
• Data‑driven approach to measuring and improving quality.
• Ability to evaluate quality effectiveness by analyzing automation outcomes and leveraging data to identify patterns and signals.

Responsibilities

• Translate quality engineering strategy and technical direction into executable plans and approaches aligned to business and delivery needs.
• Collaborate directly with product and engineering partner teams to embed quality objectives within those teams’ delivery contexts.
• Design and implement scalable, data‑driven automated validation approaches that reduce reliance on manual and UI‑heavy testing.
• Contribute to metrics and quality signals (e.g. automation coverage, test reliability metrics, CI/CD feedback loops) through instrumentation and KPIs.
• Implement and enforce quality gates (API coverage, performance thresholds, reliability criteria) within Dev‑owned CI/CD pipelines.
• Provide technical leadership as a senior individual contributor to the Quality Engineering team.
• Influence, guide and coach SDETs through hands‑on collaboration in coding, automation design/engineering, data analysis, etc.
• Lead by example through design, coding and reviews, setting a high standard for the quality engineering craft.
• Bring teams together and drive alignment in ambiguous situations through technical credibility and sound business judgement.
• Identify risks and guide teams through technical problem‑solving, risk‑based testing and execution leadership.
• Designing, building and evolving scalable automation frameworks across API, service, and UI layers—API‑first as core principle.
• Integrating validation into CI/CD pipelines (e.g. Jenkins, GitHub Actions, GitLab CI).
• Implementing modern API testing approaches such as contract testing, service virtualization, and data‑driven validation.
• Driving the transition from Selenium‑heavy UI automation to a layered testing approach (API → integration → minimal UI).
• Exploring and implementing AI‑assisted and agentic testing approaches to improve coverage, speed, and maintainability of test automation.
• Partnering with developers to improve testability, observability, and API‑first approach.
• Collaborating with DevOps and releasing engineering to support reliable, automated deployments.
• Leading root cause analysis for production issues and implementing preventative engineering solutions.
• Being the Dev teams’ quality advocate, promoting shift‑left quality practices over manual and UI‑driven downstream approaches.
• Designing and implementing automated validation across API, service, and system layers.
• Building systems that prevent defect leakage through early validation and automation.
• Executing performance, security, and regression validation through automated frameworks integrated into pipelines.

Skills

10+ years experience

Senior SDET

Automation framework design

API-first testing

AI-powered testing

CI/CD integration

Automated NFR validation

Distributed systems

Playwright/Cypress/Postman

AWS/Azure / containers

Tools

Playwright

Cypress

Postman

Docker/Kubernetes

Job description

Vancity is seeking an Engineering Lead, Quality to steer quality engineering across member‑facing platforms. You will lead hands‑on engineering, build scalable automation, and drive API‑first testing with AI‑driven approaches.

This full‑time, permanent role is based at the Vancity head office with hybrid work; on‑site presence may be required for events. You will partner with product and engineering to embed quality, design data‑driven validation, and contribute to CI/CD feedback loops.