Job Title: SDET/Quality Engineering
Duration: 06 Months Contract to Hire
Type: 3 days/week onsite (hybrid)
Location: Mississauga, ON
We are seeking a visionary and hands-on Senior Software Development Engineer in Test (SDET)/Quality Engineering Architect to define, champion, and drive the global quality engineering strategy across multi-tier, high-throughput trading platforms.
In this role, you will lead the technical vision for automated quality gates, design scalable test automation frameworks from scratch, integrate cutting-edge AI-driven testing tooling, and establish robust in-sprint automation and performance engineering practices across global distributed teams. Acting as both a principal architect and a hands-on technical mentor, you will partner closely with Development, Architecture, Product Management, and Business stakeholders to ensure resiliency, low latency, and zero-defect delivery across complex enterprise ecosystems.
1. Architectural Strategy & Framework Engineering
- Enterprise Test Architecture: Design, build, and maintain next-generation, cloud-native test automation frameworks from scratch using Core Java, BDD/TDD principles, and modern architectural design patterns.
- In-Sprint Automation Acceleration: Spearhead shift-left quality practices, enabling engineering squads to achieve true in-sprint test automation for UI, microservices, and distributed streaming/messaging pipelines.
- AI & Intelligent Testing Integration: Evaluate, integrate, and scale AI/ML-assisted testing solutions (e.g., generative AI for synthetic test data generation, predictive quality gates, self-healing test automation, and intelligent test impact analysis).
- Multi-Tier & Service-Level Automation: Architect robust API and microservice testing frameworks (REST, gRPC, WebSockets, Kafka/messaging queues) using Rest Assured, Mocking frameworks, and contract testing (Pact).
- Data Architecture & Validation: Architect comprehensive data validation frameworks capable of validating complex financial data pipelines, data consistency, and transactional integrity across relational (Oracle/PostgreSQL) and NoSQL (MongoDB) databases.
2. Performance Engineering & Non-Functional Architecture
- End-to-End Performance Strategy: Formulate and execute non-functional testing strategies encompassing load, stress, spike, endurance, and latency benchmarking using JMeter, Gatling, or distributed cloud performance engines.
- Observability & Bottleneck Identification: Analyze system bottlenecks across CPU, memory, database query execution, network latency, and JVM performance to provide actionable optimization recommendations to core engineering teams.
- Resilience & Chaos Engineering: Implement resilience, failover, and high-availability testing paradigms across cloud and containerized environments.
3. Continuous Delivery & Quality Gates
- Cloud & CI/CD Pipeline Architecture: Deeply embed automated quality gates into enterprise CI/CD pipelines (Jenkins, Bitbucket Pipelines, Tekton, GitHub Actions, Harness) across containerized environments (Docker, Kubernetes, OpenShift).
- Continuous Quality Analytics: Define and instrument automated metrics and dashboards reflecting code quality, test coverage, defect leakage, MTTR, and test execution efficiency.
4. Technical Leadership & Global Governance
- Global Team Technical Leadership: Provide technical direction and architectural governance to SDETs and QE engineers globally (bridging North America and APAC teams).
- Standards & Best Practices: Establish enterprise-wide quality benchmarks, coding standards for test repositories, code review policies, and test artifact reusability guidelines.
- Stakeholder Alignment: Collaborate with Global Product Owners, Business Analysts, Enterprise Architects, and Development Leads for comprehensive test planning, release coordination, and risk assessment.
Technical Skills & Qualifications
- Experience Level: 8-12+ years of progressive experience in software development and quality engineering, with at least 3+ years in a Lead SDET, Principal SDET, or QA Architect capacity.
- Domain Background: Proven track record in Financial Services, Capital Markets, FinTech, or low-latency Trading Platforms with an understanding of trading workflows, order management, and financial data flows.
- Core Programming & Design: Expert-level proficiency in Core Java (collections, multithreading, concurrency, OOP design patterns).
- Framework Design: Demonstrated track record of building scalable, maintainable test frameworks from the ground up (Custom hybrid frameworks, Cucumber BDD, TestNG/JUnit).
- API & Service Testing: Deep expertise in RESTful API testing, service virtualization, contract testing, and tools such as Rest Assured, Postman/Newman, and WireMock.
- UI Automation: Extensive hands-on experience in Selenium WebDriver, Playwright, or Cypress with design patterns like Page Object Model (POM) and Screenplay pattern.
- Performance Testing & Engineering: Solid hands-on background in JMeter, performance profiling, load injection architecture, and identifying system capacity limits.
- Database & Data Validation: Strong query formulation and automated verification capabilities across SQL (Oracle, PostgreSQL) and NoSQL (MongoDB).
- CI/CD & DevOps: Strong hands-on experience integrating automated suites into CI/CD pipelines with Git, Bitbucket, Jenkins/Tekton/Harness, and containerization tools (Docker, Kubernetes).
- AI Tooling & Innovation: Practical exposure to or active implementation of AI-assisted testing tools, LLM-driven test case generation, and automated self-healing scripts.
Preferred / Nice-to-Have Skills
- Prior background as a full-time Software Development Engineer (Java/Spring Boot).
- Experience with message brokers and event-driven architectures (Apache Kafka, RabbitMQ, IBM MQ).
- Familiarity with Contract Testing (Pact framework) and Service Mesh architectures.
- Experience with Cloud native platforms (AWS, GCP, or OpenShift/Kubernetes).
- Familiarity with Security testing fundamentals (DAST/SAST integration into pipelines).
Education & Certifications
- Education: Bachelors or Masters degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Information Technology, or equivalent practical experience.
- Certifications (Advantageous):
- Certified Software Test Architect / ISTQB Advanced Level (Test Automation Engineer / Technical Test Analyst).
- AWS / GCP Cloud Architecture or Developer Certifications.
- Java SE Professional Developer Certification.
