Quality Assurance Engineering Manager

About This Opportunity

We are representing a confidential SaaS client in a rare ground-floor opportunity: building and leading a dedicated QA automation function from scratch. This is a hands-on, player-coach role where you'll spend roughly half your time writing automated tests, building framework components, and reviewing code—and the other half setting direction, hiring, and coaching the team you build.

You'll choose the tooling, set the standards, and define how AI fits into testing practice. In your first 90 days, you'll partner with engineering and AI teams to understand current practices, confirm prerequisites, select your framework, and stand up a proof-of-concept suite on the highest-risk flows. By the end of year one, you'll have delivered a working automation suite, a small high-performing team, a quality metrics dashboard in active use, and a clear plan for AI adoption.

Responsibilities

• Define and own the quality engineering strategy and roadmap across the product portfolio
• Stay hands-on: personally write automated tests, build framework components, and review code alongside the team (roughly half your time)
• Select the test automation tooling and framework, and set the standards squads build on
• Integrate automated testing into CI/CD pipelines and partner with DevOps on stable, repeatable deployments
• Define quality gates: what blocks a merge and what blocks a release, aligned with engineering leadership and risk
• Drive a risk-based approach to testing so effort goes where it protects clients most
• Push tests down the stack (API before UI), drive down the flaky-test rate, and enable squads so the practice doesn't depend on any one person
• Hire, coach, and grow a team of automation engineers, and raise testing discipline across product squads
• Own quality metrics and a dashboard that leadership trusts, providing objective signals for go/no-go release decisions
• Evaluate and adopt AI-assisted testing tools (test generation, self-healing tests, defect triage, agentic testing) through a practical, hybrid model, while keeping a human-in-the-loop standard

What We're Looking For

Required:

• 7+ years in software quality or engineering, including 3+ years leading and growing engineers
• A track record of building or significantly maturing a test automation practice
• Current, hands-on coding ability: you can build framework components and write automated tests yourself, and you want to keep doing so in this role
• Strong technical judgement on automation frameworks, CI/CD, and test architecture, backed by recent hands-on experience
• Fluency with modern automation tooling (Playwright, Cypress, Selenium) and CI/CD (GitHub Actions, Jenkins, GitLab CI)
• Experience defining quality metrics and using them to influence release decisions
• Clear communicator who can translate quality risk into terms leadership and product can act on
• Hands-on understanding of how AI is changing testing, with sound judgement on where it helps and where it doesn't
• Familiarity with testing AI or LLM features (evaluation harnesses, golden datasets, guardrails, bias and accuracy checks), or the ability to get there quickly
• Located in Canada

Nice to Have:

• Background as an SDET or automation engineer earlier in your career
• Experience introducing quality practices into an organization that did not have them before
• Experience in a regulated or high-reliability domain (utilities, fintech, healthcare or similar)

How We Work With You

Our talent team at Get A Job.ai partners with you throughout the entire process. You'll apply through our platform at getajob.ai, where one of our recruiters will screen your background and experience. If there's a strong match, we'll submit you to our client with our recommendation. Please do not contact the client directly—we'll manage all communication and coordination on your behalf.

The interview process includes: a recruiter screen (45 minutes), a hiring manager interview (45 minutes), a technical assignment, final interviews where you'll present your assignment (60 minutes), and reference checks before offer.

Pay

Pay details will be discussed during the screening process and are competitive with the market for this level of experience and responsibility.

Equal Opportunity: Get A Job.ai is an equal opportunity employer. We welcome applications from all qualified candidates and provide accommodations during our process when requested.