About Actual™

Hospitality is built on actuals, that's not just our tagline, it's how we operate. At Actual™, we're building the payment infrastructure hospitality businesses run on, moving millions of dollars in hard-earned tips directly to the employees who earned them. No cash envelope, no spreadsheet, no two-week wait.

Our flagship product, Actual™ Tips, handles tip pooling, instant tip payouts, cashless tip distribution, reporting, and compliance, so operators can eliminate manual admin and reduce payroll burden. Beyond tips, Actual Ops gives operators a live view of labor cost, cost of goods sold, purchases, and data-driven sales forecasts, replacing gut-based scheduling decisions with real numbers. And Actual Payroll extends that same automation to payroll itself, built specifically for hospitality operators and their teams.

Backed by N49P, Northside Ventures, Union Capital, and other investors, we're trusted by restaurants, hotels, and coffee shops across Canada to move real money reliably. The numbers you can trust.

The role

Our pace is why we're hiring a Software Development Engineer in Test.

We're building the next generation of our platform and shipping more often than ever, and we want to ship faster still. That only works if our tests are the reason we're confident in a release, rather than a person checking it by hand at the end of a sprint.

As our first Software Development Engineer in Test, you'll own how we know our software works.

You'll work closely with our VP of Engineering, our Staff Engineers, and our infrastructure team to build the test framework, test data, and CI gates the whole engineering team relies on. Our developers own the quality of what they build. Your job is to make that easy to do and hard to skip. You'll sit inside engineering, not at the end of a handoff.

Success means a failing test stops a bad change before it reaches a customer, developers trust the suite enough to act on it, and we can deploy money-moving software more often without anyone holding their breath.

What you'll own

  • In your first few months:

    • The test strategy. What's automated at which layer, what blocks a deploy, what developers own, and where a human still looks. Written down, agreed with the team, and actually used.

    • The end-to-end framework. We have a new test suite that runs nightly against a seeded test organization with known money totals. You'll take it from "runs" to "gates deploys": stable, fast enough fr every pull request, and trusted when it goes red.

    • Money-movement coverage. Tip distribution, payouts, and the other flows where a bug means someone doesn't get paid today. These get covered end to end first.

  • Over the year:

    • Tests that block merges. Working with infrastructure on per-PR preview environments, required CI checks, and a path from weekly deploys toward daily.

    • Test data that looks like reality. Data factories and seed data that let developers and tests exercise real scenarios without touching production data.

    • Partner simulation. Mocking our payment and banking partners' sandboxes to exercise every scenario we need. You'll own a local simulator for partner APIs and keep it honest as those APIs change.

    • Developer experience for testing. Fast local runs, clear failures, a low flaky-test rate. Make the right thing the easy thing, so developers write and use the tests.

    • Measuring quality. Escaped defects, flaky-test rate, bugs caught before release versus after - the numbers that tell us whether it's working.

What we're looking for

  • Substantial experience building and owning test automation for a production web product. This is the single most important thing. We need someone who has built a framework a team relied on to ship, not only written tests inside someone else's.

  • Strong engineering skills. Our stack is Python and Django, PostgreSQL, Celery, Redis, Docker, and React with TypeScript, running on DigitalOcean. You don't need every piece of it, but you should be at home in this shape of system and able to work in a large existing codebase to build the appropriate test strategy and infrastructure.

  • Real CI ownership. You've wired tests into a pipeline and made them a gate, including the unglamorous parts: parallelization, quarantining flaky tests, test environments, seeded data.

  • A strategy, not just a suite. You know what belongs at the unit, integration, and end-to-end layers, and you can explain why to a skeptical developer.

  • You raise the bar by making it easier, not by gatekeeping. You work closely with developers and infrastructure engineers, and you'd rather pair with someone on their first test than file a ticket about it.

  • Operational judgment about money. You understand that a missed regression on a tips platform means someone doesn't get paid. We're looking for the instinct to test the scary paths first, and the honesty to say when something isn't ready.

  • The ability to work independently across a distributed team. Our engineers are spread across Canada, Japan and Europe. You'll need to communicate clearly in writing and drive work without someone assembling your week for you.

Helpful, not required: Playwright specifically; fintech, payments, or payroll experience; testing third-party API integrations, contract testing, or service virtualization; visual regression tooling such as Chromatic; using AI tools to write and maintain tests well; having been the first test automation hire somewhere before.

What this role is not

We'd rather be direct than have you discover this in week three.

This isn't a manual QA role, and it isn't a sign-off step at the end of the sprint. It's a hands-on individual contributor role, not a management position - there's no team under you today. It's also not a product architecture role: two staff engineers own our technical direction and the money-movement design. Your domain is how we test and how we know we're ready to ship, and it's genuinely yours.

You'd be joining a company where the product grew fast which means the first year involves building foundations alongside the greenfield work. If that prospect is energizing rather than discouraging, we should talk. If you want to arrive somewhere with a mature test platform and a team of automation engineers already in place, this isn't that job, and we won't waste your time pretending it is.

How we work

We're a small engineering organization - around thirty people across the company - which means your work is visible and your judgment carries weight. We run two-week sprints, we're deliberate about the balance between feature work and platform investment, and every engineer here uses AI tooling as a normal part of the job.

We're remote-first with a distributed team, and we're honest about the tradeoffs that come with it: strong written communication matters more here than it would in an office.

Compensation and details

  • Salary: $80,000-$115,000 CAD, based on experience and depth in the areas above

  • Location: Remote within Canada

  • Full-time permanent position

How to apply

Click here to submit your details - https://bsxn99lvr70.typeform.com/to/dYCyfY1t . We're interested in one thing specifically: tell us about the most complicated customer implementation you've run - what made it hard, and what you'd do differently now.

No cover letter template required. We read every application.

Actual is an equal opportunity employer. We welcome applications from people of all backgrounds and are committed to building a team that reflects the diversity of the industry we serve. Accommodations are available on request at any stage of the hiring process - just let us know what you need.