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Activate: What We Do 

Activate is redefining how the world plays across Canada, US, and beyond into the global market. We’re 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, you’ll need your reflexes, wits, and a team to beat the challenges - it’s 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.

Visit playactivate.com to see Activate in action.  Follow @activategames on TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook to stay locked in.

Position Overview 

Enter The Role

The Senior QA Automation Engineer is responsible for elevating the reliability, speed, and coverage of quality assurance across Activate's 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 Activate’s 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:

• Bachelor’s 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, contact hr@playactivate.com which is an email monitored for this purpose.

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