Hybrid Senior Quality & Automation Engineer

at Kira

• Job title: Senior Quality & Automation Engineer
• Job type: Full Time
• Experience level: Senior
• Salary: $140,000 - $190,000 per year
• Degree requirement: Bachelor's Degree
• Tech skills: AWS, Cloud, Cypress, Distributed Systems, Java, JavaScript, Jest, JUnit, Kotlin, Next.js, Python, React, Spring, Spring Boot, SpringBoot
• Location requirements: Hybrid, New York City, United States

About the role

• Senior Quality & Automation Engineer ensuring high product quality and reliable experiences using AI for an education startup. Design and implement automated testing for web and AI services.

Responsibilities

• 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

Requirements

• 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

Benefits

• Competitive compensation and equity.
• 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 🐶