Senior SDET

About Us

Air-tek is a Canadian-based software company offering a powerful suite of innovative products that have already captured a significant share of a massive global market. With strong product-market fit, demand is growing rapidly. While our global customers know us well, we operate in stealth mode during this exciting growth phase.

Our diverse team is united by a passion for solving complex problems, a drive to innovate, and a commitment to reshaping the passenger-centric travel industry. Headquartered in Toronto, our inclusive culture is built on trust, collaboration, product excellence, and continuous personal growth. We love what we do and support each other every step of the way.

The Role

We’re looking for a Senior Software Development Engineer in Test (SDET) to build and improve the infrastructure that makes reliable, scalable testing possible.

This is a hands-on engineering role focused on test environments, CI/CD pipelines, containerized infrastructure, and test data management. You’ll work closely with our development, infrastructure, and quality engineering teams to make environments easier to provision, test data safer and more dependable, and automated feedback faster and more actionable.

Your primary focus will not be writing browser or API test cases. Instead, you’ll strengthen the systems and tooling that enable our engineers and SDETs to test effectively--from local development through CI and shared or ephemeral test environments.

This role is ideal for someone who combines senior-level technical judgment with a willingness to get into the details: writing code, debugging pipelines, configuring environments, and solving problems across application and infrastructure boundaries.

What You'll Do

Test Infrastructure & Environment Engineering

• Design, build, and maintain reliable test infrastructure for automated integration and end-to-end testing.
• Develop repeatable approaches to provisioning, configuring, and tearing down test environments, including ephemeral environments where appropriate.
• Work hands-on with Docker and Kubernetes to support containerized applications and their testing dependencies.
• Improve consistency across local, CI, and shared test environments by addressing configuration drift, dependency management, and environment-specific failures.
• Partner with infrastructure and development teams to diagnose issues involving application configuration, service connectivity, container workloads, and environment readiness.
• Build practical tooling that helps engineers create, use, and troubleshoot test environments with less manual intervention.

Test Data Management & Privacy

• Own and improve approaches to creating, seeding, validating, refreshing, and cleaning up test data.
• Build repeatable data setup workflows that support reliable, isolated test execution.
• Work with SQL and MongoDB to investigate data issues and establish appropriate test datasets.
• Apply privacy-aware practices to test data, including sanitization or masking of sensitive information and the use of synthetic data where appropriate.
• Address data dependencies and contamination between tests to reduce inconsistent results and improve reproducibility.

CI/CD & Continuous Testing

• Build, maintain, and troubleshoot automated testing workflows in CI/CD pipelines, including GitHub Actions or comparable platforms.
• Integrate environment provisioning, readiness checks, test data setup, test execution, and cleanup into delivery workflows.
• Implement meaningful quality gates that provide timely feedback without creating unnecessary delivery friction.
• Improve execution speed and reliability through appropriate parallelization, test isolation, resource management, and failure diagnostics.
• Make failures easier to investigate through useful logs, reports, and retained diagnostic artifacts.
• Distinguish application defects from test, data, pipeline, and environment failures, and address their underlying causes.

Automation & Developer Enablement

• Develop maintainable automation and supporting tools using Python and Pytest; experience with C# is also valuable.
• Extend shared fixtures, reusable modules, and test utilities that help engineering teams write dependable tests.
• Support API, integration, and browser-based automation where needed, including Playwright, while keeping infrastructure and test enablement as the primary focus.
• Collaborate with developers and other SDETs to introduce testability considerations early in design and implementation.
• Evaluate tools pragmatically, choosing solutions that meet the team’s needs without unnecessary complexity.

Technical Ownership & Quality Leadership

• Take ownership of improvements from problem definition and design through implementation, adoption, and ongoing maintenance.
• Help define the technical direction for test infrastructure and test data management.
• Document environment workflows, troubleshooting practices, and technical decisions so others can work independently.
• Mentor teammates through code reviews, pairing, and practical guidance on automation and infrastructure.
• Communicate trade-offs clearly and prioritize improvements that have a measurable impact on engineering productivity and confidence in releases.

About You

• Significant hands-on experience as an SDET, quality engineer, or software engineer working on test infrastructure and automation, with demonstrated senior-level ownership.
• Direct experience building and troubleshooting test environments and CI/CD pipelines—not solely coordinating or delegating this work.
• Practical experience with Docker and Kubernetes, including configuring workloads and investigating failures in containerized environments.
• Experience provisioning and maintaining non-production environments, managing application configuration, and supporting dependent services.
• Strong programming skills in Python, ideally with Pytest; C# experience is also valuable.
• Strong working knowledge of SQL, MongoDB, and test data management, including data setup, validation, isolation, and cleanup.
• Experience integrating automated testing into platforms such as GitHub Actions, CircleCI, or Jenkins, and familiarity with deployment workflows.
• The ability to debug problems across code, pipelines, infrastructure, configuration, and data rather than treating every failure as a test issue.
• Sound engineering judgment: you build maintainable solutions, understand trade-offs, and avoid over-engineering.
• A collaborative, self-directed approach and the ability to turn ambiguous problems into practical improvements.
• Thoughtful use of AI-assisted development tools, with ownership of the code you submit and the ability to explain, validate, and refine generated output.

Particularly Valuable Experience

• Building ephemeral or on-demand test environments.
• Managing sensitive test data, including PII sanitization, masking, or synthetic data generation.
• Working in a startup or smaller engineering team where you owned infrastructure and tooling directly.
• Infrastructure-as-code and repeatable environment provisioning.
• API and integration testing, Playwright-based browser automation, or performance and load testing.

Why Join Air-tek

• Shape the test infrastructure and tooling that enable reliable software delivery.
• Collaborate with a high-impact engineering team solving global-scale challenges.
• Enjoy meaningful technical ownership in a fast-paced, low-ego environment.
• Improve how developers and quality engineers work across the SDLC.
• Benefit from competitive compensation, career growth, and the opportunity to make a real impact.

The salary range for this role is $80,000 to $130,000. In addition to salary, new hires may be eligible to receive stock options.

The salary range shared is intended as a guide; the final salary offered may vary based on factors including the experience and skillset of the candidate. Our company is committed to providing a fair, equitable, and competitive salary that reflects the value an individual brings to the organization.

Ready to build the environments, infrastructure, and tooling that make software quality scalable? Apply to join Air-tek.