SDET Lead

Job Description:

The SDET Lead will own the quality engineering strategy for the RAPID team within Product Creation in Vancouver. This is a hands-on, innovation-minded leader who builds automation frameworks, tools and platforms from the ground up, embeds quality into the product creation lifecycle, and mentors engineers to ship faster with confidence. The role partners closely with product, design, engineering and data teams to turn new ideas into reliable, tested, production-ready solutions.

Principal Duties and Responsibilities

• Define and lead the test automation strategy, roadmap and quality standards for the RAPID team, balancing speed of innovation with reliability.
• Design, build and maintain scalable automation frameworks and in-house tools (UI, API, integration, performance and data testing) that become reusable assets across product creation teams.
• Embed quality into the product lifecycle by partnering with product owners and engineers on shift-left testing, testability reviews, acceptance criteria and rapid prototyping of new product ideas.
• Build and own CI/CD quality gates (e.g., GitLab pipelines) with automated regression, smoke and release-readiness checks, and test-environment and test-data automation.
• Lead, mentor and coach SDETs and QA engineers; set coding standards, conduct code reviews and grow the team's automation capability.
• Evaluate and introduce innovative tools and approaches, including AI-assisted test generation, self-healing tests, synthetic data and low-code accelerators, through proofs of concept that demonstrate measurable value.
• Define and report quality metrics (coverage, defect escape rate, flakiness, cycle time) and use them to drive continuous improvement.
• Drive root-cause analysis for defects and production incidents, and implement preventive automation and process improvements.
• Communicate quality risks, status and trade-offs clearly to technical and business stakeholders.

Qualifications, Skills, Experience and Personal Requirements

• Expert in test automation with Selenium, Playwright, Cypress or similar for web and mobile, and REST/GraphQL API testing tools (e.g., Postman, REST Assured).
• Strong programming skills in at least one of Python, Java, JavaScript/TypeScript or C#; able to build frameworks and internal tools, not only scripts.
• Proven experience leading SDET or QA automation teams, including mentoring, planning and delivery in Agile environments.
• Hands-on experience building CI/CD pipelines and quality gates, ideally with GitLab, Jenkins or GitHub Actions.
• Experience with performance and load testing (e.g., JMeter, k6, Gatling) and test observability (e.g., Datadog, Grafana).
• Experience testing cloud-based applications and microservices (AWS, Google Cloud Platform or Azure), including containers (Docker, Kubernetes) and infrastructure as code basics.
• Demonstrated product creation and innovation mindset: has built new tools or platforms, run proofs of concept and turned ideas into adopted solutions.
• Familiarity with AI/ML-assisted testing tools and approaches is a strong asset.
• Experience in retail, e-commerce, apparel or product lifecycle (PLM) systems is an asset.
• Excellent problem-solving skills, attention to detail and a bias for automation.
• Strong communication and collaboration skills across cross-functional teams.