Staff Quality Engineer

This is a consumer fintech startup, and you will be working with serial entrepreneurs who have built strong consumer brands and innovative products. We value extreme ownership, clear communication, a strong sense of craftsmanship, and the desire to create lasting work and work relationships. Yes, you can build an exciting business AND have real-life real-customer impact.

You will be Kikoff's first quality engineer. Millions of users trust our platform, and quality is essential to that trust. Today we have solid unit test coverage and user feedback loops — but no automation frameworks, no quality metrics, and no systematic approach to quality. You'll change that.

You'll define our quality strategy, build the systems that implement it, and enable product teams to own quality themselves. This is a foundational engineering role: you build frameworks, CI/CD quality gates, and developer tooling — you don't gatekeep releases.

This role reports to the Foundational Engineering org, and is a peer to the cloud platform and security leads. 

Define Quality Strategy

• Assess quality gaps across backend (Ruby on Rails), web (SolidJS), and mobile (Flutter/Dart)
• Establish quality metrics and baselines — defect escape rates, CI feedback loop speed, test reliability, coverage ramp
• Present a quality roadmap to engineering leadership with clear milestones and resource needs

Build Quality Systems

• Design and implement test automation frameworks across backend, web, and mobile
• Expand automated testing from unit coverage to integration, E2E, contract, and visual regression
• Build quality gates into CI/CD pipelines at diff, merge, and release stages
• Create self-service testing tools that product teams adopt independently
• Partner with platform engineering on ephemeral environments and local execution automation

Enable Product Teams

• Train engineers on testing frameworks and quality practices
• Build documentation and runbooks that make self-service the default
• Drive adoption through transparency: dashboards, coverage gaps, flaky test tracking, quality trends
• Collaborate with Security on compliance testing (SOC 2, PCI-DSS)

Integrate AI into Quality

• Embed quality controls into AI-assisted development workflows
• Build or integrate AI-powered testing tools (test generation, triage, regression detection)

• 10+ years in quality engineering, with multiple instances of building QA functions or automation frameworks from scratch
• Strong coding ability — you build tools, frameworks, and infrastructure beyond test scripts
• Experience across multiple surfaces: backend, web, mobile, API
• Deep familiarity with CI/CD pipelines and test integration at various stages
• Track record of measurable quality impact: you can cite specific metrics you moved
• Enablement mindset — you build systems that make other engineers more effective
• Comfortable with ambiguity and able to define direction independently

• Experience with AI-assisted testing workflows or eval systems for AI-generated code
• Flutter/Dart mobile testing experience
• Fintech or regulated industry experience
• Infrastructure-as-code familiarity (Pulumi, Terraform)
• Performance testing tools (k6, Gatling, JMeter)
• Open source testing framework contributions