Senior Systems Testing/QA Specialist

We are seeking a highly accomplished Senior Systems Testing/QA Specialist to drive the end-to-end quality assurance lifecycle, testing strategy, and defect management for large-scale enterprise systems. In this role, you will lead complex bug triage processes, build and execute structured manual and automated test suites, and perform deep-dive verification across graphical (GUI) and backend data layers. Working closely with cross-functional Agile product squads, you will ensure applications are robust, performant, secure, and fully compliant with data integrity and digital accessibility mandates.

Location: Toronto, ON (Hybrid)

Duration: 9-month contract

Advantages

• High-Impact Quality Leadership: Command the complete defect resolution and validation lifecycle for highly critical transactional software solutions.
• Diverse Automation Tool Sandbox: Solidify your resume by deploying cutting-edge functional UI test suites alongside robust API, database backend, and performance testing frameworks.
• Cross-Functional Agile Authority: Act as the vital technical link aligning developers, business systems analysts, and project managers on operational readiness.
• Stable Public-Facing Runway: Secure a 9-month engagement within a highly structured corporate landscape with clearly defined paths for delivery.

Responsibilities

• Defect Triage & Lifecycle Ownership: Lead and facilitate comprehensive defect triage sessions with development teams and business units, analyzing system errors down to the root cause, managing priorities, and authoring formal quality metrics reports.
• Automation Engineering: Develop, debug, and maintain scalable automated test scripts utilizing modern toolsets (Selenium, Cypress, OpenText UFT, or TestComplete), integrating execution pipelines seamlessly into CI/CD workflows.
• Comprehensive Test Execution: Architect and run comprehensive manual and automated test scenarios covering black box, system integration (SIT), regression, unit, and user acceptance testing (UAT).
• API & Backend Validation: Configure and execute protocol validations using Postman, writing complex database queries to perform backend data transformations, migration verification, and schema validation.
• Performance & Scale Stressing: Design and deploy multi-tier performance test scripts using JMeter or LoadRunner to isolate infrastructure bottlenecks, testing system scalability under simulated traffic loads.
• Security & Vulnerability Auditing: Conduct baseline application security testing, collaborating with specialized teams to identify and remediate perimeter vulnerabilities.
• Digital Accessibility Governance: Assess, validate, and verify that user interface components strictly meet the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) and AODA compliance regulations.
• Test Data Strategy Management: Build and manage data environment profiles, programmatically generating realistic, sufficient test datasets while maintaining data privacy restrictions.
• Agile Ceremony Collaboration: Actively contribute to Agile/Scrum ceremonies (sprint planning, daily stand-ups, retrospectives), translating user stories and requirements criteria into detailed, testable specifications.

Qualifications

• Core Quality Engineering Seniority: 5 to 10 years of progressive professional experience in software quality assurance, systems testing, and technical test design within complex multi-tier application landscapes.
• Defect Triage & Reporting Mastery: Proven, solid experience isolation-testing software anomalies, managing ticket lifecycles, and producing high-tier defect logs and summary updates (Strictly Required).
• Regression Automation Depth: Extensive, hands-on experience designing and executing automated regression scripts alongside structured manual exploration techniques (Strictly Required).
• Multi-Domain Testing Expertise: Verified background delivering distinct manual and automated verification tracks encompassing black box, security/penetration, backend database queries, and UAT streams.
• Enterprise Toolchain Literacy: High proficiency tracking testing matrices and requirements mapping inside modern tools, explicitly Azure DevOps (or Jira/ALM) ecosystems.
• Scripting & Querying Aptitude: Practical ability to parse code parameters or configure scripts utilizing programming basics (e.g., Python, JavaScript, or Bash) to handle system verification.

Nice to Have

• Prior professional experience delivering software quality assurance frameworks within a Canadian public sector framework or health/business ministry.
• Practical testing or configuration experience with enterprise Contact Centre application ecosystems.
• Exposure to validating Commercial Off-the-Shelf (COTS) package