Senior QA Automation Engineer

#EnterTheGame

Activate: What We Do

Activate is redefining how the world plays across Canada US and beyond into the global market. Were a technology company that fuses a game a workout and a party into one unforgettable experience.We believe play should move people - physically and socially. Behind every room youll need your reflexes wits and a team to beat the challenges - its easy to start hard to beat.

Activate is experiencing significant expansion and are looking to grow our team with the addition of a Senior QA Automation Engineer. This is a full-time permanent position. We are looking for this role to join our team on-site at our Winnipeg corporate office.

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Position Overview

Enter The Role

The Senior QA Automation Engineer is responsible for elevating the reliability speed and coverage of quality assurance across Activates game software and interactive platforms through advanced test automation with a particular focus on agentic automation AI-driven agents that can plan execute and adapt test coverage with minimal manual scripting. This role will design build and maintain automation frameworks that let autonomous or semi-autonomous testing agents explore game features detect regressions and validate player-facing experiences at a pace and scale beyond traditional scripted testing.

This role will partner closely with software developers game designers product owners and the broader QA team to embed intelligent automation into the software development lifecycle and CI/CD pipelines while mentoring other QA team members on automation best practices.

The Duties and Responsibilities:

Quality Engineering Automation and AI

• Define and evolve Activates Quality Engineering strategy across software games venue technology APIs services and digital products including a layered test architecture spanning unit integration end-to-end performance and post-deployment validation.
• Design build and maintain reusable automation frameworks libraries fixtures and CI/CD templates continually improving their reliability speed scalability and maintainability.
• Establish standards for test design coding quality evidence capture and release readiness.
• Apply AI-assisted and agentic techniques such as test-scenario generation risk-based test selection exploratory testing coverage-gap detection and failure triage where they measurably improve coverage speed or diagnostics.
• Define guardrails for AI-assisted testing including data access privacy human review reproducibility and versioning and maintain deterministic release gates independent of probabilistic AI conclusions.

Product Testability

• Partner with developers and architects to improve system testability through stable automation identifiers structured logging test APIs and other testability hooks and flag designs that make testing unnecessarily slow or fragile.
• Ensure significant features include appropriate testability observability and automated coverage as part of the Definition of Done.

Test Environments and Data

• Define and improve test environments that are representative reproducible and easy to reset and build reusable privacy-safe test-data factories for player game store and operational scenarios.
• Use mocks stubs simulators or service virtualization where dependencies are unreliable or impractical.

CI/CD and Release Controls

• Integrate automated validation into pull requests builds deployments and release workflows with execution tiers spanning developer checks through production synthetics.
• Use change risk and historical defect data to guide test coverage decisions and ensure failures include actionable evidence such as logs traces screenshots and reproducible steps.
• Define when failed tests should block a merge require investigation or trigger rollback and support progressive delivery and canary validation.

Automation Reliability

• Own the reliability and maintainability of shared automation establishing thresholds for flaky tests and distinguishing product environment and framework failures.
• Establish quarantine ownership and repair processes for unstable tests and remove or redesign automation that creates more maintenance burden than quality value.

Developer / QA Enablement

• Enable developers to create and maintain automated tests as part of feature delivery providing reusable tools templates code reviews and coaching.
• Reinforce developer accountability for unit component and integration testing and ensure escaped defects lead to root-cause analysis and permanent regression coverage.
• Mentor QA Analysts and developers in modern automation AI-assisted testing and failure diagnosis.

People Leadership and Collaboration

• Lead mentor and develop team members; hire and organize training for direct reports.
• Conduct checkpoints and performance assessments as well as create development plans for direct reports.
  

The Qualifications:

• Bachelors degree in Computer Science Software Engineering or a related field or equivalent professional experience.
• Six or more years of experience in Software Engineering Quality Engineering SDET or software quality assurance including at least three years focused on test automation.
• Significant hands-on experience designing building or materially improving reusable automation frameworks test platforms or developer-quality tooling.
• Strong programming proficiency in at least one language commonly used for test automation.
• Experience testing APIs services asynchronous workflows data stores distributed systems and user interfaces.
• Demonstrated experience integrating automated tests and quality gates into CI/CD pipelines.
• Strong knowledge of modern testing practices including test isolation determinism testability layered automation contract testing integration testing regression testing UI automation and non-functional testing.
• Practical experience using AI-assisted or agentic testing approaches such as LLM-driven test generation exploratory agents self-healing automation coverage analysis or failure diagnosis.
• Familiarity with prompt engineering LLM evaluation or AI-agent orchestration is preferred.
• Experience enabling developers to adopt shared automation frameworks and improve quality practices.
• Strong analytical judgment regarding when to use deterministic automation AI-assisted techniques or human validation.
• Experience working in Agile environments and with tools such as Jira.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills including the ability to explain automation strategy technical risk and AI-agent behaviour to technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Reliable transportation and the ability to travel to Activate locations for deployment and in-venue testing when required.
  

The Perks:

• Competitive Salary
• Benefits package
• Paid time off
• Casual dress
• Employee discount
• On-site parking

Activate is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment. Activate is committed to providing access equal opportunity and reasonable accommodation for individuals with disabilities in employment its services programs and activities. To request reasonable accommodation for a protected characteristic contactwhich is an email monitored for this purpose.

We thank all applicants for their interest however only those candidates selected for interviews will be contacted.

Required Experience:

Manager