Manual QA Engineer (Contract to Hire)

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.