SDET Lead

We are seeking an experienced Senior QA Leader to take ownership of our overall Quality Assurance strategy, testing frameworks, and global QA delivery. In this role, you will lead and scale our software quality operations primarily by managing and steering our outsourced third-party QA vendor teams.

We are seeking an experienced Senior QA Leader to take ownership of our overall Quality Assurance strategy, testing frameworks, and global QA delivery. In this role, you will lead and scale our software quality operations primarily by managing and steering our outsourced third-party QA vendor teams.

You will bridge the gap between internal product management, engineering teams, and external QA partners—ensuring that our software releases meet the highest standards of reliability, performance, and security.

• QA Strategy & Process Governance Define, execute, and evolve the enterprise QA vision across web, mobile, and API platforms.
• Establish automated quality gates within our CI/CD pipelines to ensure continuous integration and deployment security.
• Drive test planning, execution strategy, risk analysis, and test data management strategies.
• Lead root-cause analysis (RCA) sessions for high-severity production defects and institute preventative measures.
• Partner closely with Product Managers, Software Engineering Leads to integrate testing early in the AiDLC
• Serve as the primary escalation point for quality-related issues across all release streams.
• Report quality health dashboards and operational status directly to senior technology leadership.

• Vendor Governance & SLA Management Defining Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), Service Level Agreements (SLAs), Statement of Work (SOW) oversight, vendor performance reviews, and cost/budget management.
• QA Strategy & Test Governance Architecting end-to-end testing strategies (manual, automated, performance, security), establishing quality gates in CI/CD pipelines, and driving a  shift-left  testing culture.
• Distributed Team Leadership Managing offshore/nearshore talent across multiple time zones, fostering quality ownership across vendor boundaries, and mitigating communication bottlenecks.
• Metrics & Quality Analytics Tracking defect leakage, test coverage, sprint velocity, defect mean-time-to-detect (MTTD), and mean-time-to-resolution (MTTR).
• Bilingual Communication (Quebec Requirement) Professional proficiency in both French and English is standard for Montreal-based leadership positions to align with local business operations and Quebec language laws (Bill 96).
• Tool Stack Test & Defect Management:
  Jira, Xray, Zephyr, Test Rail
• Test Automation Frameworks:
  Cypress, Playwright, Selenium, Appium, Postman, Rest Assured
• CI/CD & Pipeline Integration:
  Jenkins, Git Hub Actions, Git Lab CI, Azure Dev Ops
• Performance & Load Testing: JMeter, k6, Blaze Meter
• Collaboration & Vendor Management:
  Confluence, Slack, MS Teams, Miro, Notion
• Analytics & Reporting:
  Power BI, Tableau, Jira Dashboards
• AI tooling:
  Claude, Codex...

• Experience:
  
  7+ years in Software Quality Assurance with 3+ years in a senior lead, manager, or QA director capacity.
• Outsourced Team Oversight:
  Proven track record of directly managing vendor teams, third-party contracts, and offshore/nearshore testing units (20+ engineers).
• Technical Depth:
  Hands-on background in test automation frameworks (Cypress, Playwright, or Selenium) and API testing (Postman, REST APIs).
• Process Mastery:
  Deep knowledge of release management, and continuous delivery pipelines (Jenkins, Git Hub Actions, or Azure Dev Ops).
• Language:
  Professional fluency in both French and English (spoken and written), required for local alignment and compliance in…