Senior Software Development Engineer in Test (SDET)

Thinkific Labs Inc.; Vancouver; Hybrid; CAD 125,000 - 187,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Flexible PTO

Health benefits

Volunteer days

Flexible work

AI tools

Job summary

Thinkific is hiring a Senior SDET to lead automation strategy within the Platform Engineering team. You will design scalable test automation across web, API, and integration layers, and build shared frameworks that elevate quality across the org.

report to Senior Engineering Manager; mentor engineers and shape QA practices. You’ll collaborate with product, developers, and operations to ensure clarity of requirements, testability, and quality objectives, while championing observability and

Qualifications

• 5+ years of automation and software testing experience.
• Experience building automation frameworks and guiding teams.
• Strong end-to-end, API, and integration testing skills.
• Knowledge of CI/CD tools and pipelines.

Responsibilities

• Lead the evolution of Thinkific’s test automation strategy.
• Develop automation suites for web, API, and integration testing.
• Mentor engineers and SDETs in test design and automation patterns.
• Collaborate with product and development teams to ensure quality requirements.

Skills

Test automation

Automation strategy

Playwright

Cypress

Selenium

CI/CD

Mentorship

Tools

Playwright

Cypress

Selenium

GitHub Actions

Jenkins

Semaphore

Job description

Who we are

Thinkific (TSX:THNC) is an award-winning learning commerce platform built for scale. By bringing together community, courses, and content with commerce, we power transformative learning experiences and give businesses everything they need to grow their revenue — all from one AI-powered platform. So far, our customers have generated over $3.7 billion in revenue and reached more than 200 million learners worldwide.

The culture we're building

We've been intentional about the culture we're building and are proud to be recognized as an award-winning culture—we’re a Certified Great Place to Work, one Canada’s Best Diversity Employers, BC Top Employers, and Canada’s Top Small & Medium Employers for 2026 by Canada’s Top 100!

Here’s what it means to work at Thinkific:

We're a high-performing team on a meaningful mission, and the way we work reflects that. Thinkers are customer-obsessed and ownership-driven — we are customer-obsessed, take full accountability for outcomes, and operate with a high degree of autonomy and trust. We care deeply for each other and believe the best ideas come from honest debate, real feedback, and diverse perspectives. It's a culture built on trust, exceptional work, and genuine respect for the people around us.

Who thrives here:

Thinkific may be the right place if you're energized by a fast-paced environment, enjoy high autonomy, and work well with ambiguity and change. You thrive in highly collaborative teams and make the people around you better. You're results-driven, take ownership without being asked, have hard conversations even when it's uncomfortable, and celebrate diverse perspectives. AI is a tool you embrace to move faster and think bigger.

Who doesn't thrive here:

If you prefer highly structured environments, need to wait for clear direction to move, dislike ambiguity and change, or find direct feedback uncomfortable, Thinkific may not be the right fit.

About the Role

Are you passionate about testing and get excited by helping to shape the testing strategy and framework at an organizational level? We’re looking for a Senior Software Development Engineer in Test (SDET) to join us at Thinkific.

As a Senior SDET, you'll join Thinkific's Platform Engineering team, a group of SREs, DevOps engineers, front-end engineers, and SDETs. We own the foundation every other team builds on: our AWS infrastructure, CI/CD pipelines, Playwright test frameworks, and the engineering standards that keep our Rails platform reliable. We believe quality belongs to everyone and gets built into the pipeline, not checked at the end, and we try to automate toil out of existence. Reporting to the Senior Engineering Manager, you'll shape how every Thinkific engineer tests and ships code by building shared frameworks, quality gates, and best practices for the whole engineering org, and by working directly with individual teams when a problem needs a closer look. Thousands of creators run their businesses on Thinkific, so your work protects their revenue and ours while helping every team release with confidence.

Your goal will be to advocate for quality at all times and keep the development team accountable to QA best practices. Here’s how you’ll accomplish this:

• Lead the evolution of Thinkific’s test automation strategy by designing scalable and maintainable automation frameworks for web, API, integration, and component level testing
• Develop advanced automation suites across front end, back end, services and integrations using modern tools such as Playwright, Cypress, Selenium or similar
• Drive improvements to our CI/CD delivery pipeline by optimizing build efficiency, reliability and parallelization
• Act as a technical mentor and coach for engineers and SDETs while elevating skills in test design, automation patterns and quality best practices
• Collaborate with Product Managers, Developers, QA and Operations to ensure clarity of requirements, testability and quality expectations
• Establish test strategies and quality guardrails for large features, system redesigns, architectural initiatives and cross team projects
• Introduce and evaluate new tools, frameworks and testing technologies through POCs and experimentation
• Influence long term quality direction by contributing to the QA automation roadmap and organizational testing strategy
• Champion observability and monitoring using tools such as Grafana, Prometheus, New Relic or similar to improve product reliability
• Lead root cause analysis for complex issues and ensure preventive automation is created as part of a continuous quality mindset
• Maintain and enforce quality assurance policies and procedures for consistency across teams and product areas

The person we have in mind likely:

• Has 5+ years of experience in automation and software testing, including building automation frameworks and guiding teams
• Demonstrates deep expertise in end-to-end testing, integration testing, API testing and service level automation using tools like Playwright, Cypress, Selenium or Protractor
• Has strong experience designing automated test frameworks for Ruby on Rails and React applications
• Understands modern software engineering principles, testing patterns, and automation architecture
• Has hands‑on experience with CI and CD tools such as GitHub Actions, Jenkins or Semaphore and has optimized pipelines at scale
• Possesses strong knowledge of quality engineering including test strategy, testability analysis, test design patterns and risk‑based testing
• Has experience with monitoring, observability and log aggregation tools such as Grafana, Prometheus, New Relic or Airbrake
• Brings experience with performance and load testing using tools like JMeter, K6 or Gatling
• Is comfortable working in distributed systems, microservices or cloud‑based architectures
• Excels at mentorship, technical leadership and uplifting others through coaching and pairing
• Is a creative problem solver who thrives in ambiguous or fast moving environments
• Communicates effectively to influence cross team decisions and drive alignment
• Loves to learn, experiment, and explore new technologies while bringing fresh ideas to elevate quality across the organization

These things would also be nice, but we think you could learn them on the job:

• Experience testing AI agents, e.g. evaluation (evals) for LLM-based features, RAG systems, or agentic workflows. Familiarity with online, offline, or building eval frameworks (DSPy, Langfuse or similar) is a plus.
• Experience establishing testing standards and governance across multiple teams
• Experience shaping or owning a company wide test automation roadmap
• Experience with AI-driven testing tools or autonomous test generation
• Familiarity with education technology platforms or LMS systems
• Experience building test environments, synthetic data systems or contract testing frameworks

The recruitment compensation range for this position is $87,600 - 109,500 - 131,400 (this range is base salary only). Your specific compensation within this range is determined based on your job-related skills, knowledge, experience, and our internal equity assessment. The range is designed to capture the full journey from developing skills to excelling in the position. Most new hires start between the minimum and midpoint, which aligns with being fully capable in the role. Salaries above the midpoint are typically reserved for team members who have demonstrated strong, consistent performance, deep expertise, and a significant positive impact within the role.

For high-demand or hard‑to‑fill positions like this one, we may hire above midpoint for candidates who bring exceptional experience, skills, or impact potential.

The Hiring Journey

1. An exploratory call with our Talent team
2. An impact‑focused interview with the Hiring Manager
3. Technical stage
4. Stakeholder Interview with cross‑collaborators

How we work with AI:

Thinkific is an AI‑forward company. We use AI tools across all teams, and our approach to hiring is no different. We use AI‑assisted tools to support parts of our recruitment operations, and we're committed to being transparent about how. We automate where it drives efficiency, but every hiring decision is made by a person, and a high‑touch, human candidate experience always comes first.

Candidates are welcome to use AI tools during the application process if desired.

Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Belonging & Accessibility:

This is just our initial idea of who we’re looking for! At Thinkific, we know that people have unique career journeys. If your experience is close to what we’ve described but you feel that you might be missing a few of the requirements, please still apply! We believe in equal opportunity and are committed to diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging across every facet of our business.

We’re also committed to providing a comfortable and accessible interview experience for every candidate. If there are any accommodations our team can make throughout our hiring process (big or small), please let us know.

What you can expect if you join Thinkific:

• An amazing team of talented, passionate, and kind Thinkers. Together, we’ve built an incredible award-winning culture—we’re a Certified Great Place to Work and have been recognized on many Great Place to Work's Best Workplaces lists for Canada, Technology, Inclusion, Women, Mental Wellness, and more! We're also one of Canada’s Best Diversity Employers, BC Top Employers, and Canada’s Top Small & Medium Employers for 2026 by Canada's Top 100!
• A competitive compensation package including base salary, equity, team‑wide bonuses, and an Employee Share Purchase Plan.
• Flexible Paid Time Off to maintain mental and physical health. Our team is encouraged to take a minimum 4 weeks of vacation, plus Thinker Holidays (extended long weekends in the summer) and time off for the December holiday season.
• Health Benefits and Wellness: Comprehensive benefits starting on Day 1 include health, vision, and dental coverage for you and your family, $3,000 for mental health care, a short‑term health plan, and an additional $900/year health or personal spending account. Plus, family friendly benefits include generous parental leave top‑ups for up to 32 weeks, as well as fertility coverage and personalized return to work options.
• 3 Paid Volunteer Days each year to give back to your community and support the causes you care about.
• Flexible Work. Choose to work from home from anywhere in Canada, at our Vancouver HQ, a co‑working space, or anywhere there’s wifi for a change of scenery.
• AI tools for every Thinker. We’re an AI‑forward team, and every employee has access to the tools they need to work smarter, faster, and make a bigger impact.
• Learning & Growth. An annual $2,000 CAD Learn and Grow fund for conferences, seminars, or courses, plus training, mentorship, coaching, and internal promotion opportunities.
• A home office setup so you’re ready to succeed with a company‑owned Macbook Pro and a budget to order a desk, chair, or any accessories to help you work comfortably and productively.
• A place where you can bring your whole self to work. We know that different perspectives lead to amazing ideas, more innovation, and, ultimately, our success as a company. We welcome applicants of all backgrounds, experiences, beliefs, identities, and statuses. Whoever you are—we can’t wait to meet you!

The Thinkific Vancouver office operates on the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and Sel̓íl̓witulh (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations of the Coast Salish People. We encourage everyone to learn more about the original caretakers of the land that you currently occupy.