QA Automation Lead

The role

You will own and elevate the quality bar across the platform by designing automation, performance testing, and quality systems. This player-coach role involves mentoring and leading a small QA team while staying hands-on.

What you will do

• Own and evolve quality strategy across frontend, backend, and AI services
• Lead and grow a small QA team including managing at least one direct report
• Partner with product and engineering to define acceptance criteria
• Design and implement scalable automated testing
• Own performance and load testing for critical workflows
• Diagnose performance bottlenecks across infrastructure and services
• Evaluate and adopt modern AI-powered tools for testing
• Improve release confidence through CI/CD integration and test observability
• Lead post-incident quality improvements
• Perform hands-on manual QA approximately 10–20% of the time

Required qualifications

• 8+ years in quality engineering, test automation, or SDET roles
• Experience mentoring or leading engineers
• Automation architect mindset
• Track record of working closely with product to shape requirements
• Experience with complex UI/UX platforms
• Performance and load testing experience with tools such as k6, Artillery, Gatling, JMeter, or Locust
• Experience with modern testing frameworks such as Playwright, Cypress, Jest, JUnit, or PyTest
• Experience building automated E2E suites in CI/CD
• Strong debugging skills across a multi-layer stack
• Familiarity testing distributed systems, APIs, and database-backed applications
• Experience defining or improving QA processes in a fast-paced startup environment
• Cloud experience, ideally AWS

Nice to have

• Experience testing AI- or LLM-backed features
• Experience with application performance monitoring, distributed tracing, and cloud infrastructure metrics
• Experience building internal tooling that improves developer velocity

Benefits

• Competitive compensation and equity
• Medical, dental, vision and life insurance
• Medical insurance plan with 100% coverage of employee premiums
• Daily lunch credit through DoorDash in office
• Free DashPass for work or personal use
• Wellhub Membership with 100% company-paid access to premium gym networks, wellness apps, and coaching
• 401(k) matching
• Pet friendly office

Before you apply

• A subsequent criminal, education, and employment history background check will be issued

About the company

Kira is a rapidly growing startup that aims to harness transformative AI technologies to make world-class personalized teaching and learning accessible to everyone.