Lead Quality Assurance Engineer

Job Title: Lead QA engineer

Location: Halifax (onsite)

12-Month Contract

Role Overview

The Lead QA will be responsible for the end-to-end quality assurance of the solution, including understanding the overall system architecture and business flows, coordinating requirements and testing activities across participating systems, and providing technical and functional guidance to the offshore QA team.

Key Responsibilities

• Develop a holistic understanding of the end-to-end system, integrations, business processes, and application flows.
• Lead QA requirement elicitation and clarification with various participating systems, application teams, business stakeholders, and SMEs.
• Analyze requirements, functional specifications, interface specifications, and solution designs to identify test scenarios and dependencies.
• Define the overall test strategy, approach, scope, test scenarios, and coverage for end-to-end testing.
• Coordinate with participating systems to understand upstream/downstream dependencies, data requirements, interfaces, and expected system behavior.
• Lead and coordinate the offshore QA team, including task allocation, technical guidance, reviews, and progress tracking.
• Review test cases, test scripts, test data, and automation assets developed by the QA team.
• Ensure coverage of functional, integration, system, regression, and end-to-end testing across all applicable flows.
• Coordinate test execution across multiple teams and systems and track testing progress against milestones.
• Manage defect identification, triage, prioritization, root-cause analysis, and resolution coordination with development and participating teams.
• Facilitate defect triage and testing status meetings with relevant stakeholders.
• Identify testing risks, gaps, dependencies, and blockers and drive them to closure.
• Prepare and maintain QA deliverables, including test strategy, test plans, test scenarios, execution reports, defect reports, traceability, and test closure reports.
• Provide regular QA status updates, metrics, risks, and issues to project leadership.
• Support SIT, UAT, regression, release validation, and production readiness activities.
• Ensure adherence to QA processes, standards, and project quality gates.

Key Skills / Experience

• Strong experience in end-to-end system/integration testing.
• Experience working across multiple applications and participating systems.
• Strong requirement elicitation and stakeholder management skills.
• Experience leading onsite/offshore QA teams.
• Strong understanding of API, integration, database, messaging, and enterprise application testing.
• Experience with defect management and test management tools such as Jira, Azure DevOps, or equivalent.
• Strong analytical, communication, coordination, and problem-solving skills.
• Ability to understand complex system flows and translate them into comprehensive test coverage.
• Experience in Agile delivery environments and working with distributed teams.

Key Outcome:

The Lead QA will act as the single QA point of coordination and ownership across the end-to-end solution, ensuring that requirements, dependencies, test coverage, execution, defects, and stakeholder coordination are effectively managed across all participating systems.