QA Architect

Ready to accelerate your career?

Cardata is where driven people make an outsized impact. We’re a small but mighty team transforming how businesses manage vehicle reimbursement — replacing outdated programs with smart, automated solutions.

Our vision is bold: to provide the most comprehensive, intelligent, and automated software and services for creating ideal vehicle programs. And we’re building toward that vision every single day.

Join us and you’ll find challenge, growth, and the chance to deliver real impact — helping hundreds of companies and thousands of drivers across North America focus on the work that matters most to them.

We’re searching for a QA Architect to own quality strategy, automation, and release standards across Engineering. Accuracy matters: our platform calculates reimbursement rates, generates payment notices, and pays drivers through Direct Pay. When something goes wrong, customers, drivers, and our Finance team feel the impact.

Reporting to the VP of Engineering, you’ll set the quality bar, make quality visible across the organization, and partner with Product and Engineering to build it into every stage of development. You’ll also have the authority to hold a release that doesn’t meet agreed standards.

This is a hands-on leadership role where you’ll build on existing quality practices, bring structure as we scale, and take ownership from strategy through execution. We’re particularly interested in candidates with experience in a SaaS, scale-up, or startup environment.

What You’ll Do

• Own the quality strategy across our web applications, APIs, and data, with particular focus on reimbursement and payment flows. The Portal will be your initial priority, with the mobile app following as quality practices mature.

• Assess existing products and features, identify quality gaps, and prioritize test plans based on risk and business impact.

• Define quality standards, release criteria, and testing expectations as part of the definition of done. Hold releases that don’t meet the bar and work with Product and Engineering leadership on go/no-go decisions.

• Guide the choice of testing approaches, tools, and frameworks within the team’s platform and budget, balancing quality, speed, and practical trade-offs.

• Build, scale, and maintain automation frameworks and shared testing tools across teams, with reliable coverage of critical flows.

• Embed automated quality gates into CI/CD, including required tests, branch protections, and coverage thresholds. Improve pipeline health and reduce flaky tests.

• Partner with DevOps/Platform to maintain stable, fast test environments that reflect production.

• Define and review a focused set of quality metrics and dashboards, including escaped defects, release failures, hotfixes, and rework. Use the results to guide decisions and drive improvement.

• Work with Engineering, Product, and Design to build testability into requirements and design. Coach engineers to test their own work and meet quality standards independently.

• Partner with Product on stakeholder testing and release readiness, and turn incident reviews and recurring quality gaps into lasting changes.

• Apply AI tools to improve testing efficiency and coverage, help the team strengthen its AI-assisted QA practices, and adapt the testing strategy as AI-assisted development evolves.

In your first 30 days, you’ll establish a quality baseline, starting with money flows, and agree on measures and targets with the VP of Engineering. Within three months, you’ll have a release bar in use. Within six months, you’ll be working toward agreed quality targets, with measurable improvement in money flows and teams taking greater ownership of testing.

What You Bring

• Experience in a SaaS, scale-up, startup, or other scaling product environment is strongly preferred.

• 7+ years in software quality, including senior ownership of quality strategy or architecture. Experience as a QA Architect, Staff SDET, Principal QA Engineer, or in a similar role is relevant.

• A record of measurably reducing production defects or improving release reliability, and using quality metrics to guide decisions.

• Experience ensuring the quality of systems that calculate or move money, with an understanding of how financial flows can fail.

• A track record of building and scaling test automation frameworks.

• Experience building and improving quality practices in a growing or evolving environment.

• A hands-on, high-ownership approach: you can set the direction, do the work, and help others adopt it.

• The ability to influence engineers and product leaders, explain testing trade-offs, and uphold quality standards without becoming a bottleneck.

• Hands-on experience with TypeScript/JavaScript testing and tools such as Playwright, Vitest, or similar.

• Experience testing REST APIs and validating data in relational databases such as PostgreSQL.

• Experience integrating automated tests and quality gates into CI/CD, particularly GitHub Actions or a similar platform.

• A strong understanding of web application architecture and modern quality engineering practices. Our current stack also includes Flagsmith feature flags.

• Experience using AI development tools such as Cursor, Claude Code, or Copilot to improve testing and automation.

• Experience with performance or load testing tools such as k6, Locust, or JMeter is a plus.

Compensation

In line with Ontario’s Pay Transparency legislation, the salary range for this role is $130,000 – $160,000 CAD annually, based on experience, skills, and alignment with the role requirements. This is a vacant position, and we are hiring with intention and seeking someone who will bring new perspective, contribute meaningfully to the team, and grow with the organization.

Why you’ll love working at Cardata:

We’ll be honest — Cardata isn’t for everyone. If you thrive in a fast-paced environment, take extreme ownership, and constantly push yourself (and your work) to be the best, you’ll fit right in.

You’ll be surrounded by driven teammates who genuinely care — about the work, about our customers, and about helping each other succeed. Together, we take on ambitious goals and celebrate the wins along the way.

What we offer in return for you bringing your best:

• Remote work and flexible working hours

• Mentorship and development opportunities (to help you achieve your career goals!)

• Extended medical & dental benefits

• Healthcare spending account

• $3,000 annual Health and Wellness Spending Account to support your overall wellbeing

• Employee assistance program (EAP)

• Flexible (Unlimited) Time Off: No annual cap on vacation, supported by a trust-based, flexible approach to time away.

Cardata is an equal opportunity employer. All candidates will be equally considered without regard to race, ancestry, place of origin, colour, ethnic origin, language, citizenship, creed, religion, gender/gender identity, sexual orientation, age, marital status, physical and/or mental handicap or financial ability. We are dedicated to creating an inclusive environment where everyone feels welcome to bring their authentic selves to work.

If you require accommodations during the recruitment process, please let us know.