{"id":833491,"url":"https://alion.io/job/kira-learning-qa-automation-lead","title":"QA Automation Lead","company":{"id":689795,"name":"Kira Learning","domain":"kira-learning.com","url":"https://alion.io/company/kira-learning","size_band":"51-200","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Ashby","truth_index":{"grade":"B","score":75,"open_postings":3,"ghost_share":0,"stale_share":1,"repost_share":0,"time_to_fill_p50_days":null,"computed_at":"2026-11-08T05:47:12Z"}},"role":"QA","role_family":"QA","seniority":"lead","employment_type":"full_time","work_mode":"hybrid","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":["New York, United States","San Francisco, United States"],"countries":["US"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":{"min":175000,"max":210000,"currency":"USD","period":"year","gross":null,"usd_annual":210000},"salary_estimate":null,"experience_years_min":8,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"AWS","optional":false},{"name":"CI/CD","optional":false},{"name":"Cypress","optional":false},{"name":"FastAPI","optional":false},{"name":"Gatling","optional":false},{"name":"Java","optional":false},{"name":"Jest","optional":false},{"name":"JMeter","optional":false},{"name":"JUnit","optional":false},{"name":"k6","optional":false},{"name":"Kotlin","optional":false},{"name":"LangSmith","optional":false},{"name":"Locust","optional":false},{"name":"Next.js","optional":false},{"name":"Playwright","optional":false},{"name":"Pytest","optional":false},{"name":"Python","optional":false},{"name":"React.js","optional":false},{"name":"Spring Boot","optional":false},{"name":"JavaScript","optional":true},{"name":"LLM","optional":true}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-07-29T18:06:47Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-07-29","last_verified_at":"2026-11-09T01:57:13Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":102,"trust":{"level":"stale","repost_count":0,"flags":["stale"],"days_open":101},"description":"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.\nAs our QA Automation Lead, you'll own and elevate the quality bar across our platform, and build the team that sustains it. This is a player-coach role: you'll spend most of your time hands-on (designing automation, performance testing, and quality systems) while also mentoring and, over time, growing and leading a small QA team.\nThis is not a traditional QA role. We're looking for a senior, pragmatic engineer who is first and foremost a doer with management experience -- someone who ensures high product quality for teachers and students while modernizing how we approach testing, performance, and release confidence, including thoughtfully applying AI tools to accelerate test creation, maintenance, and coverage. You'll be the dedicated owner of end-to-end test coverage, performance test scaffolding, and load testing, and you'll have at least one QA engineer reporting to you.\nThis is a full-time position that requires flexibility with work hours and availability outside of regular business hours. 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).\nWhat You’ll Do\nOwn and evolve our quality strategy across frontend, backend, and AI services, and be the dedicated owner of end-to-end test coverage, performance test scaffolding, and load testing\n\nLead and grow a small QA team - mentoring engineers, setting standards, and managing at least one direct report - while staying hands-on yourself\n\nPartner closely with product and engineering to define clear acceptance criteria and prevent defects early\n\nDesign and implement scalable automated testing across end-to-end, integration, regression, and performance layers\n\nOwn performance and load testing for critical workflows - login surges, classroom activity, assignment submissions, real-time features, and AI services - building realistic workload models from production usage, establishing baselines and capacity targets, and validating the platform ahead of peak usage\n\nDiagnose performance bottlenecks across test infrastructure, networks, application services, caches, databases, and third-party dependencies, and partner with engineering on remediation\n\nEvaluate and adopt modern AI-powered tools to accelerate test generation, maintenance, debugging, and coverage\n\nImprove release confidence through stronger CI/CD integration, test observability, and failure diagnostics, and establish pragmatic quality gates that improve reliability without slowing velocity\n\nLead post-incident quality improvements, help prevent regressions, and contribute to documentation and runbooks\n\nFlex into hands-on manual QA when needed (~10-20% of the time)\n\nWhat We’re Looking For\n8+ years in quality engineering, test automation, or SDET roles, with experience mentoring or leading engineers\n\nAutomation architect mindset - you design and build quality systems, not just execute tests\n\nProduct partnership - a track record of working closely with product to shape requirements, spot edge cases, and prevent defects early\n\nComplex UI/UX platform experience - you've owned quality for a sophisticated, user-facing web platform\n\nPerformance and load testing experience - hands-on with tools such as k6, Artillery, Gatling, JMeter, or Locust, including designing workload models and interpreting latency percentiles, throughput, concurrency, and resource saturation\n\nStrong experience with modern testing frameworks such as Playwright, Cypress, Jest, JUnit, or PyTest, and building automated E2E suites in CI/CD\n\nStrong debugging skills across a multi-layer stack (ours: Next.js/React frontends, Kotlin/Java Spring Boot backends, Python FastAPI AI services, LangSmith agent workflows), with familiarity testing distributed systems, APIs, and database-backed applications\n\nExperience defining or improving QA processes in a fast-paced startup environment, with practical judgment about when to automate, when to test manually, and when to push back\n\nCloud experience, ideally AWS; clear communication across technical and non-technical audiences; high attention to detail and strong product intuition\n\nNice to Have\nExperience testing AI- or LLM-backed features - evaluating nondeterministic outputs, prompt regression testing, latency budgets, and graceful degradation when model providers have issues\n\nExperience with application performance monitoring, distributed tracing, and cloud infrastructure metrics\n\nExperience building internal tooling that improves developer velocity\n\nWhat Success Looks Like\nFewer high-severity bugs reaching production and greater automated coverage of critical workflows\n\nRepeatable performance tests that identify scaling risks before they affect teachers and students, with clear baselines and capacity expectations for peak usage\n\nFaster, more confident releases and quality standards engineers respect rather than bypass\n\nA growing QA function and AI-assisted processes that meaningfully reduce manual effort\n\nWhat We Offer\nCompetitive compensation and equity. For applicants in the US, the salary range for this role is $175,000 - $210,000, depending on relevant experience and skill set\n\nMedical, dental, vision and life insurance, including a medical insurance plan with 100% coverage of employee premiums\n\nDaily lunch credit through DoorDash in office + free DashPass to use anytime for work or personal use\n\nWellhub Membership: 100% company-paid access to premium gym networks (Orangetheory, SoulCycle), 60+ wellness apps (Headspace, MyFitnessPal, Apple Fitness+), and 1:1 coaching sessions spanning fitness, mental health, nutrition, and sleep\n\n401(k) matching\n\nPet friendly office\n\n Equal Employment Opportunity Employer\nAt 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.\n Background Check\nKira 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.","description_format":"text","description_chars":7261,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":8,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":null,"security_clearance":false,"languages":[]},"benefits":["Equity","Health insurance","Life insurance","Pet friendly"],"hiring_locations":[{"name":"United States","iso":"US","kind":"country"}],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":["EdTech Platforms","Education AI"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-09-12T17:41:33Z"}],"visa":[{"country":"US","licensed_sponsor":true,"adverts_offering_sponsorship_24m":0,"sanctioned_now":false,"evidence":"H-1B filings in 12 months: 1","filings_12m":1,"filings_prev_12m":0,"green_card_filings_12m":0,"median_offered_wage_usd":162500,"route":null,"cap_exempt":false,"checked_at":"2026-11-08T10:45:15+00:00","sources":["US Department of Labor: LCA disclosure data (H-1B, H-1B1, E-3)"],"filings_for_role_12m":0}],"liveness":{"score":12,"band":"cold","label":"Long shot","p_open":1,"p_active":0.418,"p_room":0.28,"age_days":101,"expected_fill_days":31,"reasons":["conf:0","velocity","win:tail","crowd:"],"computed_at":"2026-11-08T05:47:12Z"},"pay":{"stated_usd_annual":210000,"is_top_pay":true},"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/kira-learning-qa-automation-lead","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/kira-learning-qa-automation-lead.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-11-09T02:02:35Z","cache_seconds":300,"methodology":"https://alion.io/methodology","terms":"https://alion.io/terms","contact":"https://alion.io/contact","api":"https://alion.io/developers","about":"Alion is a live layer of people, companies and AI agents: who they are, whether they are real and active right now, what they do and how to work with them, readable by people and by agents and paid per call.","catalog":"https://alion.io/catalog.json","usage":{"tier":"crawler_verified","counted_by":"address","units_charged":1,"used_today":4315,"day_limit":null,"remaining_today":null,"minute_limit":300,"resets_at":"2026-11-10T00:00:00Z"}},"offers":[{"id":"company.slices","title":"One company in depth, by slice","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.1,"usd":0.01,"plus_per_slice":{"credits":0.05,"usd":0.005}},"unit":"per company, plus each slice with data","note":"the employer in depth","call":{"mcp_tool":"get_company","arguments":{"id":689795},"rest":"https://alion.io/mcp/rest/get_company?id=689795"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.slices&for=job%2Fkira-learning-qa-automation-lead"},{"id":"market.stats","title":"A market slice: pay, demand and time to fill","status":"live","price":{"credits":2,"usd":0.2},"unit":"per slice","note":"pay, demand and time to fill for this role and place","call":{"mcp_tool":"market_stats"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=market.stats&for=job%2Fkira-learning-qa-automation-lead"},{"id":"job.search","title":"Open jobs by role, technology, place, pay and visa","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.1,"usd":0.01},"unit":"per posting in a list","note":"similar open postings","call":{"mcp_tool":"search_jobs"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=job.search&for=job%2Fkira-learning-qa-automation-lead"},{"id":"company.verify","title":"Is this company real and active right now","status":"pilot","price":null,"unit":"per company","request":{"url":"https://alion.io/catalog/request","method":"POST","body":"{\"offer\": \"company.verify\", \"for\": \"job/kira-learning-qa-automation-lead\", \"note\": \"what you need it for\"}"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.verify&for=job%2Fkira-learning-qa-automation-lead"}],"agent":{"mcp":"https://alion.io/mcp/jobs","mcp_open":"https://alion.io/mcp/open","next":[{"tool":"get_job","arguments":{"id":833491}},{"tool":"search_jobs","arguments":{"company":"kira-learning.com","detail":"compact"}},{"tool":"match_people","arguments":{"job_id":833491},"note":"people open to offers who fit this vacancy"}],"note":"The same data through MCP tools: https://alion.io/mcp/open needs no sign-in (compact searches, postings, people); https://alion.io/mcp with an Alion account has everything. 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