---
title: 'Manual QA Engineer (Contract to Hire) at Kira'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/manual-qa-engineer-contract-to-hire-kira-new-york-p9t54b5g109t'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-12'
---

# Manual QA Engineer (Contract to Hire) at Kira

- **Company:** Kira
- **Location:** New York, NY
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** hybrid
- **Posted:** 2026-08-26
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-12
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/kira/7f42ae05-e3db-4b78-8b76-04693772727a

## Job description

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.

## 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.

## About Kira

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Kira is an AI-native operating system for K-12 education that replaces the entire teaching and learning tech stack by unifying curriculum, instruction, assessment, and intervention in one end-to-end platform.
- **Entity Type**: Private (Series A)
- **Headquarters**: Palo Alto, California, United States
- **Founded**: 2021 (LinkedIn cites 2022; company career page shows foundational milestones starting in 2021)
- **Founders**: Andrea Pasinetti (Co-founder, CEO), Jagriti Agrawal (Co-founder, VP of AI), Andrew Ng (Chairman)

## Core Business
- **Primary industry/industries**: K-12 Education Technology (EdTech); AI in Education
- **Target customers**: K-12 school districts, schools, and educational institutions across the United States (B2B, Enterprise)
- **Mission or purpose statement**: To create an AI-native learning platform that empowers educators, accelerates student learning, and streamlines school operations — making AI in education "actually work, not just as a buzzword, but as a true force for progress" [kira-learning.com/about](https://www.kira-learning.com/about).

## Products & Services
- **Kira 2.0 (The AI Operating System for Education)**: A fully interactive, end-to-end AI platform that replaces the entire K-12 teaching and learning software stack. It combines curriculum creation, lesson planning, grading, feedback, tutoring, translation, analytics, and student support into one system. Key capabilities include:
  - **Assessment and Mastery**: Real-time student response tracking that drives dynamic grading and feedback.
  - **Intervention and MTSS (Multi-Tiered Systems of Support)**: Automated identification of gaps and targeted support within instruction.
  - **Multilingual and Special Populations**: Adaptable instruction for ELLs, IEPs, and diverse learners without lowering expectations.
  - **Curriculum and Course Creation**: AI generation of full, standards-aligned courses for any subject or grade level.
  - **Career and Workforce Pathways**: CTE and AI pathways for modern career readiness.
  - **Flexible Learning Models**: Support for virtual programs, credit recovery, and staffing gaps.
- **All offerings are SaaS**, delivered as a cloud-based platform that integrates with existing district infrastructure (LMSs, curriculum).

## Market Standing
- **Valuation**: Not publicly disclosed.
- **Key Metric – Total Funding**: USD $22.5 million across three rounds.
- **Annual Revenue**: Approximately USD $1.0 million (as of latest available data) [linkedin.com/company/kira-learning](https://www.linkedin.com/company/kira-learning).
- **Notable Investors**:
  - **New Enterprise Associates (NEA)** (led Series A)
  - **AI Fund** (led by Andrew Ng; led Pre-Seed and Seed)
  - **Rick Yang** (Partner, Head of Technology at NEA, serves on board)
- **Growth Signals**:
  - Headcount grew **68.3% year-over-year**, now at approximately **43 employees**.
  - Operates in **6 countries** (United States, Togo, China, Morocco, Netherlands, United Kingdom).
  - 17 active job postings (monthly job post growth of +13.3%, yearly +54.5%).
  - LinkedIn follower count grew **55.5% year-over-year**.
  - Recent hires include a Design Director, Senior Product Manager, and AI Learning Scientist.

## Competitive Advantages
- **"One System" Architecture**: Unlike most EdTech tools (lesson planners, grading systems, LMS, intervention tools) that are separate, Kira replaces the entire stack with a single, coherent platform, eliminating handoffs and reducing district operational overhead.
- **Built-in Differentiation at Scale**: The AI adapts instruction for IEPs, ELLs, and interventions without requiring teachers to rebuild materials.
- **Standards-Aligned & Explainable**: All rubrics, logic, and adaptations are visible and explainable to teachers, with FERPA and COPPA compliance built in.
- **Founded by World-Class AI Experts**: Chairman Andrew Ng (co-founder of Coursera, former Chief Scientist at Baidu, co-founder of Google Brain) and co-founder Jagriti Agrawal (AI leader) provide unmatched credibility and AI talent access.
- **Enterprise-Grade Compliance**: Designed for districts, with student data remaining under district control.

## Strategic Focus
- **Replace Fragmented Tool Sprawl**: The company’s core message is that schools need one system, not more disconnected AI tools. They are actively positioning Kira 2.0 as the solution to "tool sprawl."
- **Scale to More Districts**: With $22.5M in funding, the team is expanding sales (Account Executives, Regional Sales Director), customer success (VP of Customer Success, Implementation Specialists), and engineering to onboard more districts.
- **Book of Business Expansion**: Focus on moving from supplemental tool to full-stack district replacement, absorbing more of the instructional tech stack over time.
- **International Expansion**: Already operating in 6 countries, with a remote office in El Salvador and presence in Togo, Morocco, and others.

## Why Work Here
- **High-Impact Mission**: The company is dedicated to fundamentally transforming K-12 education with AI — a clear, tangible mission that directly affects teachers and students.
- **Cutting-Edge AI Work**: Engineers and scientists work on real-time mastery models, adaptive tutoring, and large-scale AI-driven curriculum generation — not just a thin ChatGPT wrapper.
- **Strong Founding Team & Backing**: Backed by NEA and AI Fund, led by Andrew Ng, providing stability and deep AI expertise.
- **Office Locations & Hybrid Policy**:
  - Physical offices in **San Francisco**, **New York**, **Los Angeles**, and **Palo Alto**.
  - Hybrid working model: roles list as "Hybrid" (some require on-site presence, others remote).
  - Remote roles also available (e.g., Implementation Specialist in El Salvador).
- **Growth Trajectory**: The company grew headcount by 68% in the last year and is actively hiring across engineering (Senior Backend, Senior Frontend, Quality/Automation), product (Senior PM, PM), design (Design Director), marketing (Senior Manager Product Marketing, Demand Gen), and sales (AE, Director of Revenue Operations).
- **Engineering Culture**: "Focus, speed, and quality" — the team describes themselves as "builders at heart" and "relentlessly focused on quality and impact" [kira-learning.com/about](https://www.kira-learning.com/about).
- **Notable Roles Open**: Senior Software Engineer (Backend, Infrastructure Focus), Software Engineering Intern, AI Learning Scientist, Account Executive, Director of Teaching & Learning.

## Sources
1. [kira-learning.com (Official Website)](https://www.kira-learning.com/)
2. [kira-learning.com/about (Company About Page)](https://www.kira-learning.com/about)
3. [Built In - Kira Learning Careers, Perks + Culture](https://builtin.com/company/kira-learning)
4. [LinkedIn - Kira (Kira Learning, Inc.)](https://www.linkedin.com/company/kira-learning)
5. [Kira Learning Careers Page (Jobs)](https://kira-learning.com/jobs)

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