Senior Quality & Automation Engineer

Job 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 https://aifund.ai/AI Fund, and Primavera. As a Senior Quality & Automation Engineer at Kira, you will own and elevate the quality bar across our platform. This is not a traditional QA role. We are looking for a senior, pragmatic engineer who ensures high product quality for teachers and students while modernizing how we approach testing, performance, and release confidence. This includes thoughtfully applying AI tools to accelerate test creation, maintenance, and coverage. This 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). WHAT YOU’LL DO - Ensure a high-quality, reliable experience for teachers and students across web, API, and AI-driven workflows - Define and evolve our quality strategy across frontend, backend, and AI services - Design and implement scalable automated testing across end-to-end, integration, regression, and performance layers - Own performance and load testing for critical workflows, including login surges, classroom activity, assignment submissions, real-time features, and AI services - Build realistic workload models from production usage patterns, establish performance baselines and capacity targets, and validate that the platform can handle expected traffic before critical launches and peak usage periods - Diagnose performance bottlenecks across test infrastructure, networks, application services, caches, databases, and third-party dependencies, then partner with engineering teams on remediation - Evaluate and adopt modern AI-powered tools to accelerate test generation, maintenance, debugging, and coverage - Partner closely with product and engineering to define clear acceptance criteria and prevent defects early in the development process - Improve release confidence through stronger CI/CD integration, test observability, and failure diagnostics - Establish pragmatic quality gates that improve reliability without unnecessarily slowing product velocity - Lead post-incident quality improvements and help prevent regressions - Contribute to documentation and runbooks that improve operational excellence - Mentor engineers on writing effective, maintainable tests and building testable systems WHAT WE’RE LOOKING FOR - 6+ years of experience in quality engineering, test automation, or SDET roles - Strong experience with modern testing frameworks such as Playwright, Cypress, Jest, JUnit, or PyTest - Experience building and maintaining automated end-to-end test suites in CI/CD environments - Hands-on experience with performance and load testing tools such as k6, Artillery, Gatling, JMeter, or Locust - Experience designing representative workload models and interpreting latency percentiles, throughput, concurrency, error rates, and resource saturation - Ability to distinguish genuine application bottlenecks from limitations or unrealistic behavior in the test harness, test data, or load-generation infrastructure - Familiarity with testing distributed systems, APIs, and database-backed applications - Experience working in cloud environments, ideally AWS - Strong debugging skills and the ability to trace issues across multiple layers of a system. Our stack includes Next.js and React frontends, Kotlin and Java Spring Boot backends, Python FastAPI AI services, and LangSmith agent workflows - Experience defining or improving QA processes in a fast-paced startup environment - Comfort evaluating and integrating AI tools into test automation and quality workflows - Practical judgment about when to automate, when to test manually, and when to push back - Clear communication skills across technical and non-technical audiences - Comfort operating in a fast-moving, high-ownership environment with changing priorities - High attention to detail and strong product intuition Nice to Have - Experience testing AI- or LLM-backed features, including evaluating nondeterministic outputs, prompt regression testing, latency budgets, and graceful degradation when model providers experience issues - Experience using application performance monitoring, distributed tracing, logs, and cloud infrastructure metrics to identify system bottlenecks - Experience building internal tooling that improves developer velocity WHAT SUCCESS LOOKS LIKE - Fewer high-severity bugs reaching production - Greater automated coverage of critical product workflows - Repeatable performance tests that identify scaling risks before they affect teachers and students - Clear performance baselines and capacity expectations for peak usage periods - Faster, more confident releases - Quality standards that engineers respect rather than bypass - AI-assisted QA processes that meaningfully reduce manual effort WHAT WE OFFER - Competitive compensation and equity. For applicants in the US, the salary range for this role is $150,000 – $190,000, depending on relevant experience and skill set - Medical, dental, vision and life insurance, including a medical insurance plan with 100% coverage of employee premiums - Daily lunch credit through DoorDash in office + free DashPass to use anytime for work or personal use - Wellhub 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 - 401(k) matching - Pet friendly office 🐶 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.