Lead QA Engineer

Reports to: Technical Director

Location: Toronto (hybrid)

Role Type: Full time

Level: Lead

Introduction

Kablamo is a fast-growing cloud digital product development company. Founded in 2017 in Australia, the business has grown quickly over the last several years, including the expansion of the team to Canada in 2021. We are proud to have assembled an amazing list of customers, including some of the best known enterprise and government organizations, in Australia and Canada. We’re looking to further accelerate our growth in both markets, and we’re seeking a Lead QA Engineer to deliver new products to market.

Kablamo is proud to be an Advanced AWS Consulting partner, and we have recently been recognised as a global leader in designing and building cloud-based data and AI/ML solutions. At the 2021 AWS Global Public Sector conference, Kablamo won the award for “Most Innovative AI/ML Solution” for our work building bushfire prediction data platforms in Australia - we were selected from more than 1,800 AWS global partners.

The Role

Our QA Leads are leaders in the way they behave, how they mobilize and lead teams and the way they coach and manage teammates and customers. Our QA Leads work closely with our agile product development teams, technical leads and Kablamo’s QA community to define and implement best-practice automation strategies.

At Kablamo, we pride ourselves on having a technical community of creative and lateral thinkers. Our automated testers are passionate advocates for their craft and they play a critical role in delivering predictable and high quality customer outcomes, quickly. The ideal candidate will have experience supporting and coaching a team, with both manual and automated QA testing experience in their background.

As a QA Lead at Kablamo, you might be deployed into customer engagement as part of a multi-disciplinary product development team or you may be called upon to consult and coach our customers about best-practices in testing and automation.

Responsibilities

• Provide vision and direction to the wider QA team, mentoring and coaching the team to drive high performance and deliver desired outcomes
• Build and drive QA culture within the wider Kablamo team
• Work with our agile product development teams, technical leads, customers and Kablamo’s QA community to define and implement best-practice automation strategies
• Provide Subject Matter Expertise to product managers, technical leaders and iteration managers in order to define efficient test plans
• Manage the successful outcomes of all deliverables within the resource and time constraints as defined by the Technical and Delivery leads
• Run and lead project stand-ups by effectively communicating status and impediments to progress
• Ensure QA process is followed for all features, including when features are tested by developers and business stakeholders
• Manage the integration of QA processes into the CI/CD pipeline
• Maintain and improve the levels of functional regression test coverage through automated testing, across key systems and as part of agile sprints
• Contribute to the sign-off of releases including being a gatekeeper for product quality and user experience
• Attend iteration planning sessions and participate in the sizing of the testing effort required to complete stories, ensuring external decencies are considered
• Work closely and communicate effectively with the development team and product stakeholders to ensure project outcomes adhere to agreed quality standards
• Ensure all project risks are raised in a timely manner and mitigation plans are developed with the delivery leads to ensure quality remains at the forefront of all decisions
• Coordinate testing documentation as required
• Be willing to dive deep to support, help and coach other members of the QA team when required
  
  

Required Skills And Experience

• 3+ years of experience in a demonstrated leadership capacity, including mentoring, managing, and supporting other QA team members
• 10+ years of QA software testing experience, including significant automation experience
• Experience coordinating and managing quality (including deployments) in an enterprise environment, or for an enterprise client
• Experience in designing and implementing test strategies, particularly for asynchronous systems and microservices architectures
• Experience with testing automation approaches utilizing open source technologies such as Playwright (preferred), K6, BrowserStack, Sauce Labs, Cypress, Selenium, WebdriverIO, jmeter, Junit/TestNG.
• Previous experience testing REST APIs and GRPC
• Experience working in agile teams within an Iterative/Agile SDLC
  
  

Desirable Skills And Experience

• Experience using CI tools such as Code Pipeline, Jenkins, GitHub Actions, TeamCity
• Experience with Apache Kafka or other event streaming technologies
• Ability to understand and define testing required to verify system interfaces and integrations between various web services (white box testing)
• Javascript/Typescript automation experience
• Experience testing native apps (iOS and Android)
• Experience with banking, financial services or other regulated industries
• Experience managing test environment requirements and test data setup
• Previous experience using Atlassian product suite of tools, primarily Jira and Confluence and test plugins such as Xray
  
  

Career Progression

• Principal/Staff QA Engineer
• QA Architect
• QA Manager
  
  

Hiring Process

• 30-min intro chat with our TA team
• 1-hr take-home assignment
• 1-hr Technical interview
• 1-hr Final/Cultural interview
• References
• Offer!
  
  

Why Work at Kablamo?

Our Culture

We acknowledge a workplace that is diverse and inclusive, enables for greater innovation and produces benefits including improved performance, improved employee happiness and wellbeing, and superior outcomes for our customers. We attribute our success to all our unique and charismatic Kablamites. Through our fortnightly back to base and our debate Thunderdomes, we enable our Kablamites to provide feedback, share ideas, challenge the status quo and technically challenge each other constructively.

The PERKS!!!

• Kablamo bonus scheme
• Remote first with a downtown Toronto office available
• Work abroad for up to 3 weeks per year (some restrictions apply)
• Career growth (we really do promote from within!)
• Individual training budget
• Online rewards platform
• Regular social events
• Blogging rewards
• Paid birthday leave
• Anniversary bonus
• Referral bonus
• Parental Leave top up
• Employee Assistance Program
• Swag
  
  

Kablamo is a proud equal opportunity employer. We make our hiring decisions solely based on your skills and experience, as well as the perspectives and value you can bring to our team. Kablamo believes that diversity is vital to provide the best service to our clients and we are committed to fostering a varied and inclusive work environment. Every effort to accommodate candidates for accessibility will be made upon request. Information received related to accommodations will be addressed confidentially.

Kablamo would like to thank all candidates for their interest however only qualified applicants will be shortlisted.