{"id":1148734,"url":"https://alion.io/job/nelson-senior-qa-analyst-12-months-contract","title":"Senior QA Analyst (12 months Contract)","company":{"id":684169,"name":"Nelson","domain":"nelson.com","url":"https://alion.io/company/nelson-4","size_band":null,"is_staffing_agency":false,"is_intermediary":false,"ats_vendor":"Workable","truth_index":null},"role":"QA","role_family":"QA","seniority":"senior","employment_type":"contractor","work_mode":"on_site","remote_scope":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":["Toronto, Canada"],"countries":["CA"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":{"min":70000,"max":null,"currency":"USD","period":"year","gross":null,"usd_annual":70000},"salary_estimate":null,"experience_years_min":null,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"Agile","optional":false},{"name":"Claude Code","optional":false},{"name":"gRPC","optional":false},{"name":"Jira","optional":false},{"name":"k6","optional":false},{"name":"OpenAI Codex","optional":false},{"name":"Playwright","optional":false},{"name":"Scrum","optional":false},{"name":"CI/CD","optional":true},{"name":"Datadog","optional":true},{"name":"Grafana","optional":true},{"name":"OpenTelemetry","optional":true},{"name":"Rest API","optional":true},{"name":"Together AI","optional":true}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-09-23T16:42:06Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-09-23","last_verified_at":"2026-09-24T01:55:34Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":0,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":null,"flags":[],"days_open":0},"description":"At Nelson, we’ve been shaping the future of education for children and youth across Canada for over 110 years. As the country’s largest K-12 education content provider, we remain dedicated to our legacy of looking forward, paving the way in creating boundless, accessible, and engaging learning experiences for all. Our innovative solutions, including Edwin, our digital learning platform, provide curriculum aligned content that support diverse learning styles while fostering critical thinking, creativity, and lifelong learning. We listen intently to the unique needs of educators, students, and administrators everywhere, and continuously evolve what we do and build to improve their lives daily. When we’re searching for individuals to join our team, we look for bold, innovative team players with a passion for education and making a positive difference in our communities. If this sounds like you, we want to hear from you! Apply to join our team today. Let’s Create Possible, one learner at a time.\nPosition Summary\nThe Senior Quality Assurance Analyst works closely with product, development, design, infrastructure, and other QA team members to deliver reliable and accessible digital learning products. This role is responsible for testing web applications across the frontend and backend using manual, API, database, automation, accessibility, and performance testing methods.\nThe successful candidate will take part in quality activities throughout the software development lifecycle. This includes planning, design reviews, test preparation, testing, defect investigation, release validation, and production regression testing.\nThis position will primarily support product development. The QA Manager may also assign a portion of the analyst’s time to infrastructure, platform, performance, or other technical initiatives based on team priorities.\nThe regular work schedule is 1:00 PM to 9:00 PM Eastern Time to provide coverage for teams working in the Pacific Time Zone.\nResponsibilities\nCreate, maintain, and execute test plans, test scenarios, and test cases for web applications.\nTest frontend and backend functionality, including user interfaces, APIs, databases, integrations, and services.\nPerform functional, regression, smoke, exploratory, integration, usability, and cross browser testing.\nFind, reproduce, investigate, and document defects in Jira with clear steps, evidence, expected results, and actual results.\nWork closely with developers, product managers, designers, infrastructure engineers, and other stakeholders to investigate and resolve quality issues.\nValidate that completed work meets functional requirements, acceptance criteria, design expectations, and quality standards.\nCreate, maintain, execute, and improve automated tests using Playwright or similar modern automation tools.\nHelp improve the structure, reliability, coverage, and maintainability of the automated regression suite.\nUse AI coding assistants such as Claude Code, Codex, or similar tools to support test development, troubleshooting, documentation, and other QA activities when appropriate.\nCreate and maintain clear QA documentation, testing standards, and reusable testing practices.\nParticipate in release testing and help identify quality risks before changes are released.\nStay familiar with the functionality of Nelson products and understand how educators and learners use them in the classroom.\nInfrastructure, Observability and Performance Testing\n\nThe Senior QA Analyst may occasionally support infrastructure and platform testing. The goal is to help the team investigate issues using technical evidence and identify regressions before they reach customers.\nUse telemetry signals such as logs, traces, and metrics to support defect investigation, bug triage, and root cause analysis.\nReview distributed traces to identify suspicious backend calls, service interactions, API requests, or gRPC calls related to a reported issue.\nUse telemetry data to help confirm whether a reported problem is reproducible and to provide useful technical evidence to development and infrastructure teams.\nCreate and execute load and performance tests using k6 or similar tools.\nUse load tests as part of regression testing to identify changes in application or service performance.\nReview performance measurements such as response time, throughput, error rate, and percentile latency including p95 latency.\nCompare performance results against previous results or established baselines to identify possible regressions.\nWork with developers and infrastructure engineers to investigate performance issues such as increased latency, excessive service calls, request fanout, or unexpected backend activity.\nAssist with release and production readiness testing when performance or infrastructure validation is required.\nRequirements\nExperience and Qualifications\n4 or more years of professional experience in software quality assurance or software testing, preferably with web based applications.\nStrong experience testing modern web applications across both frontend and backend systems.\nHands-on experience testing APIs, databases, integrations, and other backend services.\nExperience creating test plans, test strategies, test scenarios, and detailed test cases.\nExperience designing, writing, and maintaining automated tests. Experience with Playwright is strongly preferred.\nGood understanding of web application architecture, frontend and backend systems, APIs, databases, services, and common security concepts.\nExperience using Jira or a similar issue tracking system to manage defects and testing work.\nExperience working in Agile and Scrum development environments with designers, developers, product managers, and other QA professionals.\nExperience with accessibility testing and knowledge of AODA or related accessibility standards.\nStrong troubleshooting and analytical skills. Able to investigate an issue beyond the visible user interface and provide useful evidence to the team.\nClear written and verbal communication skills. Able to explain defects and technical findings in simple and concise language.\nAbility to manage multiple priorities and move between product, automation, release, and infrastructure testing when needed.\nStrong collaboration skills and the ability to work effectively with cross functional teams.\nBachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience.\nPreferred Qualifications\nWorking knowledge of application observability and telemetry, including logs, distributed traces, and metrics.\nExperience using observability tools such as Grafana, Datadog, OpenTelemetry, Application Insights, or similar platforms.\nExperience with performance and load testing using k6 or a similar tool.\nAbility to understand performance measurements such as p95 latency, throughput, response time, and error rate.\nExperience using telemetry and traces to support root cause analysis and defect investigation.\nExperience testing service based or microservice architectures, including REST APIs or gRPC services.\nExperience using AI coding assistants such as Claude Code, Codex, or similar tools as part of software development or QA workflows.\nExperience contributing to automation frameworks, continuous integration workflows, or automated regression pipelines.\nExperience testing education technology, content platforms, learning applications, or other customer facing digital products is an asset.\nWhat Success Looks Like\nA successful Senior QA Analyst can independently test complex features, clearly communicate risks, build reliable automated coverage, and help the team investigate issues across the full application stack. The analyst should be comfortable working with both product teams and technical infrastructure teams and should use testing data, automation, and telemetry to make quality decisions based on evidence.\nBenefits\nCompensation\nThe base salary range for this contract position starts at $70,000 per annum based on experience. This position may also be eligible for performance-related incentive pay. Compensation is part of our broader Total Rewards package, which includes benefits and programs that support employee well-being and growth.\nWhat We Offer\nAt Nelson, we believe in taking care of our people. Your well-being, growth, and work-life balance matter to us, which is why we offer a comprehensive benefits package designed to support you-professionally and personally.\nThe below benefits apply to this temporary contract position.\n\nThis role comes with hybrid flexibility, M-F, standard business hours\nCommuter friendly location (Sheppard & Don Mills)\nFree parking on-site\nFree, convenient shuttle bus service from Don Mills Subway Station to and from the office\nAccess to on-site fitness center and fitness classes\nAccess to LinkedIn Learning for continuous skill growth\nMentorship and professional development opportunities\nA comprehensive Employee Assistance Program (EAP) providing confidential support spanning from mental health services to financial counselling, and many things in-between.\nDon't have 100% of the above qualifications? Do you still think Nelson is a great fit for you? We encourage you to apply anyway!\nOur EDI Statement\nNelson teaches the world by learning from everyone in it.\nWe are committed to fostering an equitable, diverse, and inclusive workplace environment. This is an integral part of our company’s culture and mission that aligns with our four key pillars of Employee Diversity, Developing Authentic and Accurate Content, Amplifying External Voices, and Supporting the Local Community and Beyond. \nWe believe in the power of education and our ability to impact social change. Truth, honesty, integrity, and respect guide our decisions and actions in the development of learning solutions that empower success for all educators and learners. \nWe value a respectful, inclusive, and safe workplace that nurtures belonging and represents many different cultures, backgrounds, perspectives, and opinions. Everyone is free to be who they are. \nWe foster and continue to build relationships that are equitable, diverse, and inclusive with existing and future partners in education. \nWe commit to holding ourselves accountable by creating measurable short and long-term goals that place equity, diversity, and inclusion at the core of what we do in our resources, the workplace, the educational community, and in the larger society. \nWe strive to build an inclusive world for everyone. We are stronger together.\nAI and Automated Hiring Tools\nNelson uses AI support tools in our applicant tracking system to help with tasks such as summarizing points and anonymizing applications. All candidate screening, assessments, and hiring decisions are done by people.\nInterview Outcome Notification\nNelson is committed to keeping candidates informed. All candidates who attend an interview for a publicly advertised role will be notified of the outcome of their candidacy. Candidates will be notified of the hiring decision no later than 45 days after the last interview.\nOur Commitment\nNelson is an equal opportunity employer and is committed to Inclusion, Equity and Diversity. As part of this commitment, we do not discriminate on the basis of age, race, sex, gender, gender identity, colour, religion, national origin, sexual orientation, marital status, citizenship, veteran status, or disability status.\nShould you require any accommodation during our recruitment and selection process, please reach out to .","description_format":"text","description_chars":11589,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":null,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":{"level":"bachelor","optional":false},"security_clearance":false,"languages":[]},"benefits":["Equity","Professional development"],"hiring_locations":[],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":[],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-09-23T16:42:06Z"}],"liveness":{"score":86,"band":"hot","label":"Hiring now","p_open":1,"p_active":0.86,"p_room":1,"age_days":0,"expected_fill_days":26,"reasons":["conf:0","win:early"],"computed_at":"2026-09-24T02:08:08Z"},"pay":{"stated_usd_annual":70000,"is_top_pay":false},"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/nelson-senior-qa-analyst-12-months-contract","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/nelson-senior-qa-analyst-12-months-contract.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-09-24T02:08:08Z","cache_seconds":300,"methodology":"https://alion.io/methodology","terms":"https://alion.io/terms","contact":"https://alion.io/contact","api":"https://alion.io/developers"}}