Manual QA Engineer (Contract to Hire)
Confirmed on the employer's own hiring board on Nov 6, 2026. First seen by Alion on Aug 26, 2026. Kira Learning scores B on the Alion truth index.
We live in a world where technology is rapidly changing the educational experiences of students and teachers everywhere, and we have the opportunity to shape how this change takes place. Kira's mission is to harness transformative AI technologies to make world-class personalized teaching and learning accessible to everyone. Kira is a rapidly growing startup backed by top-tier Venture Capital funds including New Enterprise Associates (NEA), Andrew Ng’s AI Fund, and Primavera.
Quality is critical to ensuring teachers and students can rely on our product every day. As a Manual QA Engineer, you will help ensure a high-quality, reliable experience across our platform. This role is focused on hands-on manual testing, exploratory testing, and validating new features before they reach production. You will work closely with product managers, engineers, and designers to deeply understand new features, identify potential issues early, and advocate for the end-user experience. You will play a key role in verifying functionality across complex workflows, including AI-powered features where outputs may be non-deterministic.
This role is ideal for someone who is detail-oriented, curious about how products work, and passionate about delivering high-quality user experiences. We have offices in San Francisco, CA and New York City, NY and we ask that employees work from one of the two locations and come into the office in-person 4 days a week (Wednesdays WFH).
What You’ll Do
Perform manual testing of new product features across web applications and AI-driven workflows
Execute regression, exploratory, and acceptance testing to validate new functionality before release
Run sanity checks on staging and release builds to ensure stability prior to deployment
Write clear, detailed, and reproducible bug reports, including steps to reproduce, logs, and impact assessments
Collaborate closely with engineers to debug issues and verify fixes
Develop a deep understanding of the product to identify edge cases, usability issues, and quality risks
Validate complex teacher and student workflows, including AI-generated outputs and interactive experiences
Evaluate features not only for correctness but also usability, clarity, and user experience
Help prioritize testing efforts based on product impact and risk
Contribute to QA documentation, testing checklists, and release validation processes
Participate in release readiness and post-release validation to ensure product stability
What We’re Looking For
2+ years of experience in manual software testing or quality assurance
Experience and expertise in QA processes and UI/UX testing (web and mobile)
Strong experience performing manual regression, exploratory, and functional testing
Experience testing web applications and user-facing products
Ability to write clear and actionable bug reports
Strong debugging skills and ability to work closely with engineers to reproduce issues
High attention to detail and strong product intuition
Excellent communication skills and ability to collaborate across engineering, product, and design
Comfort working in a fast-moving startup environment
Strong curiosity and willingness to deeply understand product behavior and edge cases
Nice to Have
Experience testing AI or LLM-powered products
Experience testing complex workflows involving APIs, backend systems, or data pipelines
Familiarity with basic developer tools (browser dev tools, logs, network inspection)
Experience testing distributed systems or modern web stacks
Our services currently span:
Next.js + React frontend
Kotlin + Java Spring Boot backend
Python FastAPI AI services
Langsmith agent workflows
What Success Looks Like
Critical user flows consistently work for teachers and students
Bugs are caught early during development rather than after release
Engineers have clear, actionable bug reports that speed up debugging
Product releases ship with high confidence and minimal regressions
AI-driven features behave reliably and degrade gracefully when issues occur
What We Offer
Hourly rate $40-$60/hr
Team lunches
Dog friendly office
Should you convert to FT, offer includes base compensation and equity. For applicants in the US, the salary range for this role is $90,000 - $120,000 depending on relevant experience and skill set
Medical, dental, vision and life insurance, including a medical insurance plan with 100% coverage of employee premiums
DoorDash credit for lunch daily
Equal Employment Opportunity Employer
At Kira, we are committed to providing an environment of mutual respect where equal employment opportunities are available to all applicants without regard to race, color, religion, sex, pregnancy (including childbirth, lactation and related medical conditions), national origin, age, physical and mental disability, marital status, sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, genetic information (including characteristics and testing), military and veteran status, and any other characteristic protected by applicable law. Kira believes that diversity and inclusion among our employees are critical to our success as a company, and we seek to recruit, develop and retain the most talented people from a diverse candidate pool. Selection for employment is decided on the basis of qualifications, merit, and business need.
Background Check
Kira will make a conditional job offer in line with local, state and federal laws, and a subsequent criminal, education, and employment history background check will then be issued.