Lead 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’sAI 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).

• 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

• 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 Py Test

• 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…