Specialist, IT Quality Assurance at Air Canada

Being part of Air Canada is to become part of an iconic Canadian symbol, recently ranked the best Airline in North America. Let your career take flight by joining our diverse and vibrant team at the leading edge of passenger aviation.

The IT-QA Delivery Specialist is a hands-on, strategic leader responsible for all aspects of Software Quality Assurance (SQA)—technical, project, process, and administration. This role drives continuous improvement, innovation, and compliance by introducing new tools, automation, AI-driven solutions, and best practices. The specialist works cross-functionally to coordinate operations, development, and testing, ensuring high-quality, timely, and cost-effective solution delivery. A firm focus on shift-left quality practices and advanced automation is central to this role.

Responsibilities

• Drive continuous improvements in Air Canada QA guidelines and champion the adoption of industry best practices, technologies, and processes for high-quality, timely, cost-effective solution deliveries.
• Analyze customer defects/feedback and incorporate preventive actions to improve solution quality.
• Ensure overall quality of all solution deployments within the business unit or domain, maintaining compliance with QA guidelines.
• Implement effective analysis of design and review test scripts, coding, automation, and integration activities based on objectives and product architecture.
• Manage all activities in the System Development Quality Lifecycle, including those executed by other departments, branches, or third parties; ensure compliance to QA guidelines and KPIs.
• Lead requirements and systems analysis efforts, translating business requirements into technical solutions.
• Lead planning and monitoring processes for assigned functional areas.
• Provide technology or services ownership direction across functional areas, including specialized or niche technologies.
• Provide financial inputs for developing, administering, and adhering to the budget allocated for the role’s span of control.
• Work across technology functions to ensure synergistic collaboration and attainment of shared goals.
• Mentor team members across functions to develop technical skills and capabilities.
• Provide business and technical inputs to Business Governance and Operational Management Committees.
• Handle high technology complexity and drive autonomous decision-making regarding technology best practices.
• Drive technology vision and continuous improvement objectives for assigned functional areas.
• Work with QA suppliers to effectively manage QA teams, resources, and processes to deliver on time with high quality.
• Monitor and measure the performance of QA resources, processes, and tools across the SDLC; report and maintain an operational scorecard.
• Ensure adherence to mandatory regulations and processes through governance of test activities within assigned areas.
• Embed QA early in the SDLC by enabling requirements-based testing, TDD/BDD, and automated acceptance criteria validation.
• Facilitate training for developers and product owners to author and automate tests at the unit, API, and component levels.
• Drive in sprint automation coverage by ensuring new features are automated within the same sprint, leveraging CI/CD pipelines (GitHub Actions, Azure DevOps).
• Lead the adoption and integration of AI-powered QA tools (agentic frameworks, LLM-based test case generation, defect prediction, self-healing automation) into all phases of the SDLC.
• Oversee implementation and scaling of enterprise automation frameworks (Selenium, Playwright, Cypress, ACATS, and custom solutions), ensuring adaptability and cost optimization.
• Champion the use of AI-driven analytics for real-time defect triage, root cause analysis, and predictive quality metrics.
  
  

Technology

• Identify, evaluate, and onboard new QA technologies, including:
• AI/Agentic QA Platforms: JIRA, Xray, agentic orchestration tools.
• Automation Frameworks: Selenium, Playwright, Cypress, Gherkin-based BDD, AI-assisted tools.
• Cloud Platforms: AWS, Azure, Bedrock, OpenSearch, VPC isolation.
• Accessibility & UX Testing: axe-core, Lighthouse, Jaws, WAVE; WCAG standards.
• Non-Functional Testing: JMeter, Gatling, security/vulnerability analysis, network simulation, service virtualization.
• Test Data Management: TDM, data masking, anonymization, GDPR, PCI, Delphix.
• Reporting & Dashboarding: Automated dashboards, monthly scorecards, executive reporting.
  

Qualifications

• University degree/technical certification or equivalent experience.
• 7+ years in IT technology, operations, people leadership, and strategy in a large company.
• ISTQB, QAI, and other relevant certifications (programming, agile methodologies).
• Significant technical depth and strategic leadership skills.
• Experience managing distributed teams and driving excellence in customer satisfaction, product quality, and reliability.
• Strong understanding of SDLCs (waterfall, iterative, agile) and contemporary QA processes/tools.
• Experience with agile testing, continuous integration, and continuous delivery.
• Knowledge of internet, e-business, mobile apps, and mission-critical systems.
• Experience with production-level testing (health checks, monitoring, failover, DR).
• Expertise in test automation, performance, and security testing.
• Strong analytical skills and experience with QA metrics (defect profiles, entry/exit criteria).
• Excellent problem-solving, communication, and project management skills.
• Demonstrated punctuality and dependability in a fast-paced environment.
  
  

Conditions Of Employment

Candidates must be eligible to work in the country of interest, at the time any offer of employment is made and seeking any required work permits/visas or other authorizations which may be required is the sole responsibility of the candidates applying for this position.

Linguistic Requirements

Based on equal qualifications, preference will be given to bilingual candidates.

Diversity and Inclusion

Air Canada is strongly committed to Diversity and Inclusion and aims to create a healthy, accessible and rewarding work environment which highlights employees’ unique contributions to our company’s success.

As an equal opportunity employer, we welcome applications from all to help us build a diverse workforce which reflects the diversity of our customers, and communities, in which we live and serve.

Air Canada thanks all candidates for their interest; however only those selected to continue in the process will be contacted.