User Acceptance Testing lead

JOB SUMMARY

UAT Lead will oversee the planning, coordination, and execution of User Acceptance Testing to ensure business requirements are met before each release.

The role also provides leadership in establish and maturing the organization’s User Acceptance Testing capability, including defining best practices, governance standards, and scalable testing frameworks across business initiatives.
The role encompasses building and maintaining a well-structured UAT repository, developing a business critical regression suite, partnering with QA and development teams to convert stable UAT scenarios into automated regression coverage, and leveraging outputs to support defect triage, risk management, and release readiness within a Customs and Trade compliance environment.
The UAT lead will act as the central authority for UAT across business and technology teams, ensuring stakeholder alignment, effective test execution, and transparent reporting of testing outcomes and risks to leadership.

KEY DUTIES & RESPONSIBILITIES

UAT test repository Creation, classification & maintenance

• Establish and ongoing maintenance of a centralized UAT test repository serving as the single source of truth for all test scenarios and test cases
• Lead the design, governance, and continuous improvement of the enterprise UAT test repository to support consistent testing practices
• Classification and stratification of test scenarios by business area, workflow type, risk level, priority, and other measures to enable efficiency test selection and impact analysis
• Consistent application of naming conventions, tagging, versioning, and traceability standards so that test cases are easily searchable, reusable, and auditable across releases
• Retirement or archival of obsolete scenarios and incorporation of new coverage as product evolves, ensuring the repository remains current and actionable

Regression suite Creation & Maintenance

• Support earlier defect detection by identifying stable UAT scenarios for conversion into automated regression suite
• Identification of high-risk, high value workflows and development of a structured regression suit (smoke, sanity, full regression)
• Ongoing maintenance of regression documentation, versioning, and change control aligned to product evolution
• Use of production incidents, defect trends, and risk hot spots to continuously strengthen regression coverage
• Define and evolve regression testing strategy to ensure critical business workflows are consistently validated across releases and system changes

Automation partnership

• Collaboration with QA and development teams to identify UAT regression candidates for automation, ensuring business intent, expected outcomes, and test data needs are clearly defined and reusable
• Definition and maintenance of automation candidate criteria (stable flow, deterministic outcomes, reliable data setup)
• Validation of automated test results by reviewing expected outcomes and confirming business correctness
• Provide subject-matter leadership on business workflow validation to ensure automated testing reflects real operational processes

Defect Triage & Release readiness

• Reproduction of issues with clear documentation, evidence, severity/priority assignment
• Collaboration QA and development teams to validate fixes and coordinate re-testing and targeted regression
• Interpretation of CI pipeline reports (screenshots, logs, pass/fail outputs) to distinguish product defects from environment, data, or test stability issues
• Lead defect triage discussions with cross-functional stakeholders to prioritize issues based on operational risk and business impact

Reporting & Release Readiness

• Clear reporting on UAT progress, defect status, risks, go/no go recommendations
• Production of UAT completion artefacts including traceability matrices, pass/fail summaries, outstanding risks, and sign-off packages
• Prepare and present regular testing progress updates to project leadership and business stakeholders to support informed release decisions

Continuous improvement

• Refinement of templates, standards, and test repositories to reduce cycle time and increase consistency
• Identification of opportunities to expand automated coverage while maintaining UAT efficiency
• Champion adoption of modern testing practices and industry standards to improve UAT maturity across the organization

Facilitate knowledge sharing and guidance across business teams performing UAT to improve testing quality and coverage

KNOWLEDGE & SKILLS

• Knowledge Canadian customs brokerage, CBSA, or trade compliance and import/export workflow an asset
• Familiarity with Agile delivery methodologies (Scrum, Kanban, or SAFe) and experience aligning UAT activities within sprint or iteration cycles
• Exposure to automated testing practices and CI pipelines (reviewing runs, reading logs, understanding quality gates)
• Experience with transaction or rule-driven systems and data validation (Excel, SQL)

WORK EXPERIENCE – MINIMUM REQUIRED

EDUCATION

CERTIFICATIONS DESCRIPTION

• Preferred: Certification in software testing (ISTQB) or equivalent
• Relevant certifications in business analysis, project management, or quality assurance may also be considered an asset

COMPETENCIES