Lead Automation QA Engineer

Location:
Calgary, AB, Canada (Hybrid / On-site)

Team:
Engineering — Quality

Reports to:
Chief Technology Officer

About QL2

QL2 has been pioneering competitive pricing intelligence for over 20 years. Our platform anonymously harvests millions of pricing and product data points every day from competitor sites across travel, retail, and automotive — turning that raw signal into the real-time insights our customers use to make profitable pricing and assortment decisions. Brands like Papa John’s and major OTAs run their pricing strategies on top of our data, and we’re scaling our Canadian engineering presence in Calgary to keep pushing the platform forward.

The Role

We’re hiring a
Lead Automation QA Engineer
to own quality strategy across a platform where data accuracy
is
the product. Reporting directly to the CTO, you’ll set the technical direction for automation across the engineering org, mentor a growing QA function, and act as the executive team’s trusted voice on quality, risk, and release readiness.

A single bad scrape pattern can cascade into thousands of incorrect pricing decisions for our customers, so we need a leader who treats data integrity as a first-class engineering concern — and who can build the systems, frameworks, and team practices to enforce it at scale.

This is a hands-on leadership role: you’ll still write code, but you’ll spend equal time shaping how the org thinks about quality and partnering with the CTO on engineering-wide priorities.

What You’ll Do

•        
Own QA strategy and roadmap
across our data extraction engines, REST APIs, analytics platform, and customer-facing portals

•        Partner with the CTO to define quality KPIs and report on them at the leadership level

•        Architect and evolve the automation framework — make build-vs-buy calls, define standards, and set the bar for test code quality

•        Lead the design of data-validation systems that detect scrape drift, schema breaks, and accuracy regressions before customers see them

•        Define and own the
release quality gates
— what gets tested, what blocks a deploy, and how we measure quality over time

•        
Mentor and uplevel
QA and SDET engineers; partner with engineering managers on hiring, leveling, and growth

•        Drive shift-left adoption — embed quality practices into design reviews, sprint planning, and code review

•        Run performance, load, and chaos testing against high-volume scrape and analytics workloads

•        Lead production incident triage and post-mortems; translate findings into durable regression coverage

•        Partner with Product, Data Engineering, and Customer Success as the senior QA stakeholder for cross-functional initiatives

•        Represent QA in architecture, platform, and roadmap decisions alongside the CTO and engineering leadership

What We’re Looking For

•        
8+ years
in QA automation, with at least 3 years in a lead or principal capacity

•        Proven track record
architecting test frameworks from scratch
and scaling them across multiple teams or products

•        Strong production-grade scripting in
Python
or
Java

•        Deep experience with
Selenium
,
Playwright
, or
Cypress
for browser automation, including framework design (page objects, fixtures, parallelization)

•        Strong REST API test architecture — contract testing, schema validation, mocking strategies

•        
SQL
fluency, with comfort writing non-trivial queries for data validation across large datasets

•        Experience designing
CI/CD quality gates
in GitHub Actions, Jenkins, or GitLab CI

•        Demonstrated ability to
mentor engineers
and influence quality practices outside your immediate team

•        Strong executive communication — you can defend a quality position directly to the CTO and translate trade-offs for non-technical stakeholders

Bonus Points

•        Experience leading QA for
web scraping, ETL, or data-pipeline-heavy
systems

•        Familiarity with
Lua
(used in parts of our extraction stack)

•        Performance testing leadership (k6, JMeter, Locust)

•        BDD or contract testing at scale (Cucumber, Pact)

•        AWS, Docker, Kubernetes

•        Domain experience in travel, retail, or e-commerce pricing

•        Prior exposure to building or scaling a QA team in a startup or scale-up environment

What We Offer

•        Competitive base salary + performance bonus (CAD)

•        Comprehensive health, dental, and vision coverage

•        RRSP matching

•        Generous PTO and flexible work arrangements

•        Hybrid setup out of our Calgary office, with a globally distributed team across North America, Europe, and Asia

•        High-impact role reporting directly to the CTO, with clear scope to shape the QA function as we grow