Quality Assurance Engineer

ThriveCart QA Engineer

ThriveCart is a powerful platform used by over 50,000 people worldwide to generate over $5B in sales. Included within the ThriveCart platform is a learning management system (LMS), affiliate management, cart and checkout functionality, making it a top solution for creators, coaches, consultants, and other businesses.

We integrate with everything you use and have a simple, clean UI with numerous features that allow customers to build income from existing traffic and we are the highest-converting cart for online businesses. Our business is growing, profitable, and backed by LTV SaaS Growth Funds, and we are looking to expand our footprint amongst online businesses.

Remote (Latin America)

Job Overview:

You'll own quality end-to-end for ThriveCart's e-commerce platform — test strategy, automation, defect prevention, and production health monitoring. This isn't a click-through-test-cases role: you own quality for your domain.

AI is a core part of the workflow here, not a bonus skill — for generating test cases, creating test data, drafting test plans, and accelerating automation. What we're hiring for is judgment: knowing which tests actually matter, understanding risk, and thinking critically about AI-generated output.

This description spans L1–L4. Interview depth and expectations scale with level — see Qualifications & Expectations by Level below.

What You'll Own:

Test Strategy & Planning

• Own the quality strategy for your features and domain: test plans, risk assessment, coverage decisions
• Flag ambiguities and testability gaps during requirements review, before code is written — shift-left quality
• Define acceptance criteria in partnership with Product
• Balance manual exploration with automated regression coverage
• Document test plans, coverage decisions, and known risk areas for async visibility across the team

Test Automation

• Write and maintain automated tests (API, integration, end-to-end) using the team's frameworks
• Keep automation suites fast, reliable, and maintainable — flaky tests are yours to fix, not ignore
• Maintain CI/CD integration for test execution
• L3+: Design and evolve the overall test automation architecture

Production Quality & Incident Response

• Monitor features in production using observability tools — quality doesn't end at release
• Respond to dev-escalations and incidents with urgency: assess blast radius, run targeted regression testing, help isolate root cause, communicate findings clearly
• L3+: Own incident response from the quality side — lead triage, coordinate regression testing, write post-mortems with defect analysis, drive preventive fixes
• L4+: Coordinate all QA activity during major incidents, communicate to stakeholders, ensure systemic fixes are validated before release

AI-Augmented QA (Expected, Not Optional)

• Use AI tools daily: generating test cases and data, drafting test plans, analyzing bug patterns, accelerating automation writing
• AI will generate more test cases than you need — prioritize ruthlessly based on risk
• Review all AI-generated test output critically: AI has no product context, you do
• L3+: Teach junior QAs effective AI workflows for testing; establish team AI quality standards
• L4+: Set team standards for AI tool usage — evaluate tools, measure impact on coverage and velocity

Defect Advocacy & Communication

• Write clear, reproducible bug reports that developers can act on immediately
• Advocate for quality: flag risks before release, document known issues, be explicit about what is and isn't tested
• L3+: Partner with Product and Engineering on quality metrics, track trends

Collaboration

• Work closely with developers to improve testability at the code level
• Help developers write better unit tests by identifying untested scenarios
• L3+: Mentor L1/L2 QAs on testing mindset, automation skills, and risk thinking

What You Bring To This Role:

Technical Environment

• Testing: API testing (Postman/REST clients), browser automation (Playwright), unit/integration test frameworks
• CI/CD: GitHub Actions (tests run on every PR)
• Observability: AWS CloudWatch, application logs, metrics dashboards
• Platform stack: PHP/TypeScript, Ruby/TypeScript, MariaDB, Redis, AWS
• Playwright is our standard framework for browser automation — what matters most is strong testing fundamentals

Must-haves:

• Strong testing fundamentals — test strategy, test case design, risk-based prioritization
• Hands-on automation experience with Playwright
• Comfortable with API testing (Postman/REST clients) and reading application logs
• Already using — or genuinely motivated to use — AI tools in a QA workflow
• Clear written communication: bug reports and test plans others can act on without a meeting

Nice-to-haves:

• Experience testing an e-commerce, payments, or subscription platform
• Familiarity with PHP, TypeScript, or Ruby codebases
• AWS/CloudWatch or similar observability tooling
• GitHub Actions or another CI/CD pipeline

Qualifications & Expectations by Level

• L1 (Junior QA) — 0–1 yrs: Executes test plans, writes simple automation with guidance, reports bugs clearly. Bootcamp, internship, or early professional QA experience is fine — we're hiring for rigor and curiosity over tenure. Uses AI to learn faster and generate test cases; validates all AI output.
• L2 (QA Engineer 1) — 1–3 yrs: Has independently owned quality for a feature or product area — not just extended someone else's test plan or suite, but built one. Writes comprehensive test plans and automation, and responds to incidents with targeted testing.
• L3 (Senior QA) — 3–6 yrs: Has led incident response from the QA side and mentored other QAs. Owns quality strategy for complex projects, improves automation architecture and infrastructure, and uses AI to multiply output rather than just speed up individual tasks.
• L4 (Lead QA) — 6+ yrs: Has set QA standards or practices for a team, not just followed them. Serves as the quality authority for a domain, drives major incident response, and partners with leadership on quality metrics and AI tooling strategy.

Success Metrics

• 30 days: First test plan written and approved, first automated tests in CI pipeline, understands the most critical user journeys
• 60 days:  Independently owning quality for a feature, automation suite stable, first incident response contribution
• 90 days:  Contributing to test strategy discussions, handling dev-escalations independently in your area

On-Call

Shared rotation with engineering (~1 week/month after ramp-up). QA on-call focuses on blast radius assessment and regression testing during incidents.

Career Path

Junior QA → QA Engineer 1 → Senior QA → Lead QA → Head of Quality

Learn More About ThriveCart

Our team thrives on collaboration, innovation, and continuous growth. We foster an open environment with regular knowledge-sharing sessions and encourage active participation in shaping the platform. Our values include:

• Commit to Excellence – We believe in delivering high-quality work and continuous improvement.
• User-Focused Problem Solving – Every design should contribute to solving a real problem for our users.
• Team Collaboration – We work better together, valuing input from every team member.
• Growth Mindset – We embrace challenges as opportunities to learn