QA Product Specialist- Industrial Communication

HMS stands for Hardware Meets Software and we work to make the world more connected, productive, and sustainable. HMS industrial communication products enable millions of machines such as robots, drives and air-conditioners to get connected to software and systems – A necessity to meet the future demands for energy efficiency and sustainability.

We build the products that make industrial equipment talk to each other. Our communication cards and modules sit inside machines, robots and control cabinets around the world, connecting them to networks such as Ether Net/IP and PROFINET.

HMS Networks is a global leader in industrial ICT, connecting devices and systems across factory automation. Our Waterloo site is a center of expertise in industrial communications interfaces, working as part of HMS's global hardware community alongside teams in Sweden, France, and other locations around the world.

We’re looking for a QA Product Specialist to join our R&D team in Waterloo, Ontario. You’ll make sure our industrial communication products (PC based interface cards, Gateways and PLC communication modules) work the way customers need them to across the whole product lifecycle, from verification and validation during development through to release and customer demonstrations. You’ll build real test setups with PLCs, I/O, sensors and actuators and turn them into automated test benches that run from our CI pipeline, reusable across future projects to cut validation time.

When a customer opportunity comes up, you’ll turn that hands‑on lab knowledge into portable demo kits that show key customers how our products fit into their systems, whether in our lab or at their sites. Over time, you’ll become the first technical contact for key customers.

• Verify and validate our industrial communication products (PC based interface cards, Gateways and PLC communication modules) throughout development, with functional, interoperability, regression and performance testing.
• Look at our products through the customers’ eyes and challenge their weaknesses before they reach the market.
• Review requirements and specifications and write test plans and test cases that prove our products work in real systems and meet customers’ needs.
• Build and maintain real test setups with PLCs, remote I/O, sensors, actuators and third‑party devices from multiple vendors.
• See defects through: reproduce them, report them clearly, help find root causes, and confirm the fixes.
• Design, build and own automated test benches (PLC, relays, I/O, cameras), including the test code, the reusable test libraries and the interfaces that let our CI pipeline drive them, with the help of AI tools.
• Grow automated test coverage step by step, from sanity and regression tests on every code push to a product validation suite that can re‑validate a product in hours, even years after release.
• Prepare demo setups and present our products to key customers, in our lab or at their sites, showing how they fit into their systems.
• Become the first technical contact for key customers: answer their technical questions and support their evaluations. This is separate from HMS technical support.
• Work closely with development, product management and sales and bring customer feedback into test plans, and keep the team informed on test status and release readiness.

• 3+ years of hands‑on work in industrial automation or in testing embedded or industrial products.
• Hands‑on experience with at least one industrial Ethernet protocol: PROFINET, Ether Net/IP, EtherCAT or other.
• Solid programming fundamentals in Python (or C#, C/C++): you write, debug and maintain your own test code, organized in a framework such as pytest or Robot Framework…