Software Engineer in Test

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.