Staff QA Lead (Laravel/PHP)

TL;DR

Staff QA Lead (Laravel/PHP): Building and scaling automated quality systems for a fintech platform with an accent on API, end-to-end, mobile, performance, and security testing. Focus on designing self-service testing infrastructure, integrating AI-assisted automation and quality gates into CI/CD, and validating payment systems against demanding compliance standards.

Location: Hybrid in Calgary, Canada; in-office Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, remote Tuesday and Thursday.

Company

Helcim is a fintech product company building a transparent payment system for merchants.

What you will do

• Architect and maintain self-service testing infrastructure for local development and CI/CD pipelines.
• Design and scale automated testing frameworks for Laravel/PHP backends and Vue applications.
• Own API, end-to-end, mobile, load, performance, and security testing strategies.
• Build automated quality gates and integrate AI tools for test generation, synthetic data, and risk analysis.
• Define real-device testing and automation for Android and iOS applications.
• Coach engineers, establish quality practices, and improve MTTR and Change Failure Rate metrics.

Requirements

• 8+ years of experience in software quality and experience building testing departments from the ground up.
• Deep expertise in Laravel and PHP testing, including Pest or PHPUnit and service container mocking.
• Experience testing Vue 3 applications with Cypress, Playwright, or Vitest, as well as API testing.
• Experience with GCP and CI/CD quality gates, preferably GitLab CI/CD.
• Hands-on mobile QA experience across iOS and Android, including real-device farms and cross-platform automation.
• Experience validating fintech systems against PCI DSS, HIPAA, or similar security and compliance standards.

Nice to have

• Experience with AI-assisted IDEs, LLM-based agentic QA workflows, or custom IDE plugins.
• Laravel Dusk, advanced Pest testing, Terraform, k6, or Locust experience.
• Open-source contributions to testing frameworks or quality-focused developer tools.

Culture & Benefits

• Hybrid schedule with office collaboration on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.
• Stock options for every team member.
• Comprehensive benefits and a Health Spending Account from day one.
• Paid vacation and a company-wide break in December.
• Maternity leave top-ups, bonding breaks, and a $500 annual training budget.
• Builder-oriented culture focused on trust, ownership, and collective success.