Senior Quality & Automation Engineer

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.

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 and reliability, including thoughtful use of AI tools to accelerate test creation 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.

What You’ll Do

• Ensure a high-quality, reliable experience for teachers and students across web and AI-driven workflows

• Define and evolve our overall quality strategy across frontend, backend, and AI services

• Design and implement scalable automated testing (e2e, integration, regression, performance)

• Evaluate and adopt modern AI-powered tools to accelerate test generation, maintenance, and coverage

• Partner closely with product and engineering to define clear acceptance criteria and prevent defects early

• Improve release confidence through better CI/CD integration, test observability, and failure diagnostics

• Establish pragmatic quality gates that increase reliability without 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
  

• 5+ years of experience in quality engineering, test automation, or SDET roles

• Strong experience with modern testing frameworks (e.g., Playwright, Cypress, Jest, JUnit, PyTest, etc.)

• Experience building and maintaining automated e2e test suites in CI/CD environments

• Familiarity with testing distributed systems, APIs, and database-backed applications

• Experience working in cloud environments (ideally AWS)

• Strong debugging skills and ability to trace issues across several technologies. Our services span: Next.js + React frontend, Kotlin + Java Spring Boot backends, Python FastAPI AI, Langsmith agent workflows

• Experience defining QA processes in fast-paced startup environments

• Comfort evaluating and integrating AI tools for test automation and quality workflows

• Practical judgment — you know 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

• Experience testing AI/LLM-backed features is strongly preferred. You'll need to think about evaluating nondeterministic outputs, prompt regression testing, latency budgets, and graceful degradation when model providers have issues.

• Experience with performance/load testing tools

• Experience building internal tooling to improve developer velocity
  

What Success Looks Like

• Fewer high-severity bugs reaching production

• Increased automated coverage in critical product workflows

• Faster, more confident releases

• Clear quality standards that engineers respect (not bypass)

• AI-assisted QA processes that meaningfully reduce manual effort

• Competitive compensation and equity. For applicants in the US, the salary range for this role is $140,000 – $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

• Flexible PTO policy and company holidays

• Lunch stipend daily

• Dog 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.