Are you passionate about high-quality software delivery? Top Hat is looking for someone to drive our quality assurance and release management functions, including our shift towards more test automation. You’ll show off your creative problem-solving skills on a regular basis as you establish and improve our processes. Integrate learning and feedback cycles throughout our delivery to enable the continuous testing needed for our continuous deployment practice. Apply your knowledge and experience with integration, release, feature flags, performance, usability, UAT, regression testing to supervise the planning and execution of automated and manual testing across our cross-functional delivery teams.
You Will:
Lead our release management, manual QA, and automated testing roles / teams. Set direction, provide mentorship, and manage future hiring needs for these functions.
Own the quality and release practices
Own the release lifecycle of our software, including rollout coordination and communication processes. Adapt our release strategies to our customer segments. Set the bar for go/no-go
Own our testing strategies around performance, functional correctness, regressions, usability, reliability, accessibility across our web and mobile platforms. Strike the right balance between agility and risk mitigation
Be accountable for test strategy, design, execution and reporting across our development teams, striving for a high bar for quality. Help teams define test strategies, create test cases and test scripts for their own domains. Make this scale through partnership with our technical leads.
Advocate for best practices in testing. Help us build a culture of taking pride in the quality of our work
Research and provide teams with suitable tools and processes for testing
Collaborate with our DevOps functions to build learning and quality controls throughout our delivery processes so that we can catch surprises earlier and course correct more adeptly across the organization
Manage quality controls both before and after deploy and customer rollout so that we can act on escaped issues sooner than our support team is able to find and prioritize them
Manage our feature flag strategy (we use LaunchDarkly)
Partner with other engineers to increase test coverage aligned to our needs
Establish quality metrics for the program and the methods for collecting those metrics. Communicate qualitative and quantitative testing status to management and key stakeholders (whether directly from your team or scaled out via delivery team processes). Drive accountability to these metrics across teams
Work with our product management, design, user research, and marketing teams to understand our customers and how we can best serve them through quality and release practices
Drive QA resource planning to meet timelines and priorities (either informing centralized QA needs or capacity within delivery teams)
Provide ongoing coaching and mentoring to team members
Provide guidance around the defect management process, including impact analysis and prioritization
Enforce project testing standards, tools, templates and methods
Facilitate discussions to anticipate and resolve conflicts and to ensure tracking and completion of deliverables when necessary
You Are:
You have at least 2 years of experience managing QA and/or release functions
You are a quick learner and you enjoy working in a fast-paced environment
You are detail-oriented and you like to spot and fix inconsistencies (in software or process) to produce a top quality product
You understand how to integrate testing into development and delivery processes
Experienced working with complicated systems and disparate teams at scale
Experienced with various types of testing, manual and automated. You have architected and scaled automation frameworks from scratch, evaluated and integrated new testing tools, and written comprehensive test plans.
Infrastructure and DevOps experience a plus but not required
You have excellent communication and problem-solving skills
You are excited to have tangible impact on a product and service used by professors, students, authors, and other faculty
Five reasons people choose to join the Top Hat team:
Award-winning company and culture. Top Hat has consistently ranked as one of the fastest-growing and best places to work in Canada.
A single mission that drives every single Top Hatter. We empower educators to engage students and unleash their potential. Our relentless focus on customers is a pretty inspiring idea to wake up to every day.
A winning long-term strategy and business model. We aim to be the dominant teaching platform in higher education in the world, and our team is making that possible through great content and product solutions that are making a real impact on educators.
A collaborative team doing really challenging work. What we’ve set out to do is ambitious and hasn’t been done before. Our team works closely together - across departments - to innovate and improve the lives of educators and students.
Great benefits, rewards, and career opportunities. We offer competitive benefits, an amazing workplace culture, and lots of room for career growth. For those who invest in themselves at Top Hat, the sky’s the limit.
About Top Hat:
Top Hat is the only all-in-one courseware platform that enables active learning—a proven student-centered teaching pedagogy that promotes deep understanding, critical thinking, and subject mastery—with interactive content, tools, and activities. Millions of students at 750 leading North American colleges and universities use Top Hat to teach and engage with students before, during, and after class, in both in-person and online education.
Headquartered in Toronto, Top Hat has consistently been recognized as one of the fastest-growing technology companies in Canada.
Top Hat welcomes and encourages applications from people with disabilities. Accommodations are available on request for candidates taking part in all aspects of the selection process.
Why team members love working at Top Hat:
A noble mission that creates meaningful, fulfilling work
A team that cares deeply for customers and for each other
Flexible, remote first work environment
Professional learning and development for all role levels
An awesome and welcoming Toronto HQ
Competitive health benefits that start on day one
A management team focused on performance, growth, engagement and connection
Our winning strategy and market potential
Innovative PTO policy with lots of time and space for self-care
Passionate customers that believe in us—and what we do
A chance to work with new tech like generative AI—and see the customer impact