Team Lead, Quality

Recently named a Waterloo Area Top Employer for the ninth consecutive year, we’re looking for innovators who can bring their expertise and passion to our growing team.

The Team Lead, Quality is an enthusiastic, customer-focused, and technology-minded tester who leads a team of quality-minded professionals. This positions will work closely with individuals, cross-functional teams, and management to understand our products and services so that they can encourage constant process improvement while ensuring that our products and services meet user and industry standards. They create, execute, and review quality plans for product roadmaps and assist teams in the creation, execution, and review of testing plans for features.
The Team Lead, Quality possesses a wealth of experience in software-related industries and can draw upon and convey these experiences when collaborating or mentoring others in any aspect of the software development process. As a leader, they coach and motivate their team by setting goals and providing constructive feedback and support. They also encourage individuals and teams to experiment to promote reflection and improve communication and collaboration within teams. Through this, they work to ensure a quality-first mindset is adopted throughout product lines and by all individuals, regardless of their role.
Why OCAS?
- We offer a hybrid work environment that gives you the flexibility to work in our Guelph office, remotely, or a combination of both.
- Your team is an amazing group of individuals who are passionate about technology and are encouraged to explore new ways of working.
- You'll start with 22 vacation days, as well as paid company breaks in the summer and at Christmas.
- We offer a corporate pension plan to help you prepare for your next stage of life.
- We also offer generous benefits that include vision and dental care, extended health care, life insurance, and more.
- We understand the importance of lifelong learning, with a generous professional development allowance, as well as other initiatives to help you skill up.
- We support several local charities and offer paid time off to volunteer in your community.

**You share OCAS' core Quality values**:

- Quality is an organizational mindset, not an individual one.
- We can test anything, whether or not we have the requirements for it: a prototype, a design, a flowchart, an idea, or even actual software.
- All software systems inherently have bugs and problems to discover.
- Passing test scenarios are encouraging; however, they don't tell the entire story.
- Automated check systems are only a piece of a successful test plan.

**In this role, you will**:

- Lead a subset of quality team members in their technical career and day-to-day work.
- Competently train new employees on current processes and expectations, conveying the benefits, drawbacks, and background of these responsibilities in a way that captures their intent.
- Provide technical and process leadership to multiple project team members (not just Quality team members), such as assisting in tasks and overcoming obstacles, reviewing others' work, providing input into feature behaviour and design, and optimizing team processes and behaviours.
- Lead efforts to create and evaluate new test processes, procedures, and methods.
- Lead efforts to improve test maintainability, reusability, and code quality.
- Provide holistic insights into risk assessment for projects, products, and services.
- Work closely with the development and testing organizations to ensure that quality is built into the process.
- Comfortably and respectfully raise risks to the appropriate level of the project team or escalation paths as required.
- Provide constructive feedback to encourage the career growth of their direct reports.
- Coach cross-functional teams to deliver high-quality solutions to challenging problems in a way that fosters communication, collaboration, and team building.
- Have a strong ability to jump in and assist with investigating issues while using a variety of tooling appropriate for the given technologies being investigated.
- Demonstrate a strong knowledge of the technologies they have worked with and use this knowledge to inform their approach to any quality-related practice.

**You should have**:

- 5+ years of formal experience, continuous learning, and / or personal growth in the software testing field.
- 1+ years in a senior software quality role with mentorship examples.
- A resume that clearly describes the interesting and unique ways you've improved product or process quality or supported customers and improved customer experience (not necessarily software products, processes, or experiences) in the past.
- Excellent verbal and written communication skills, with the ability to communicate observed software behaviour and its impact on the current project's success, as well as to persuade and influence team members when identifying new ways of implementing features a