---
title: 'QA Automation Lead at Kira'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/qa-automation-lead-kira-new-york-ab5gr8fbcwmv'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-12'
---

# QA Automation Lead at Kira

- **Company:** Kira
- **Location:** New York, NY
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** hybrid
- **Posted:** 2026-07-29
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-12
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/kira/858982fb-8df9-4100-ac91-0a1a0f5234ff

## 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’shttps://aifund.ai/AI Fund, and Primavera. As our QA Automation Lead, you'll own and elevate the quality bar across our platform, and build the team that sustains it. This is a player-coach role: you'll spend most of your time hands-on (designing automation, performance testing, and quality systems) while also mentoring and, over time, growing and leading a small QA team.

This is not a traditional QA role. We're looking for a senior, pragmatic engineer who is first and foremost a doer with management experience -- someone who ensures high product quality for teachers and students while modernizing how we approach testing, performance, and release confidence, including thoughtfully applying AI tools to accelerate test creation, maintenance, and coverage. You'll be the dedicated owner of end-to-end test coverage, performance test scaffolding, and load testing, and you'll have at least one QA engineer reporting to you.

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).

## What You’ll Do

- Own and evolve our quality strategy across frontend, backend, and AI services, and be the dedicated owner of end-to-end test coverage, performance test scaffolding, and load testing
- Lead and grow a small QA team — mentoring engineers, setting standards, and managing at least one direct report — while staying hands-on yourself
- Partner closely with product and engineering to define clear acceptance criteria and prevent defects early
- Design and implement scalable automated testing across end-to-end, integration, regression, and performance layers
- Own performance and load testing for critical workflows — login surges, classroom activity, assignment submissions, real-time features, and AI services — building realistic workload models from production usage, establishing baselines and capacity targets, and validating the platform ahead of peak usage
- Diagnose performance bottlenecks across test infrastructure, networks, application services, caches, databases, and third-party dependencies, and partner with engineering on remediation
- Evaluate and adopt modern AI-powered tools to accelerate test generation, maintenance, debugging, and coverage
- Improve release confidence through stronger CI/CD integration, test observability, and failure diagnostics, and establish pragmatic quality gates that improve reliability without slowing velocity
- Lead post-incident quality improvements, help prevent regressions, and contribute to documentation and runbooks
- Flex into hands-on manual QA when needed (~10–20% of the time)

## What We’re Looking For

- 8+ years in quality engineering, test automation, or SDET roles, with experience mentoring or leading engineers
- Automation architect mindset — you design and build quality systems, not just execute tests
- Product partnership — a track record of working closely with product to shape requirements, spot edge cases, and prevent defects early
- Complex UI/UX platform experience — you've owned quality for a sophisticated, user-facing web platform
- Performance and load testing experience — hands-on with tools such as k6, Artillery, Gatling, JMeter, or Locust, including designing workload models and interpreting latency percentiles, throughput, concurrency, and resource saturation
- Strong experience with modern testing frameworks such as Playwright, Cypress, Jest, JUnit, or PyTest, and building automated E2E suites in CI/CD
- Strong debugging skills across a multi-layer stack (ours: Next.js/React frontends, Kotlin/Java Spring Boot backends, Python FastAPI AI services, LangSmith agent workflows), with familiarity testing distributed systems, APIs, and database-backed applications
- Experience defining or improving QA processes in a fast-paced startup environment, with practical judgment about when to automate, when to test manually, and when to push back
- Cloud experience, ideally AWS; clear communication across technical and non-technical audiences; high attention to detail and strong product intuition

## Nice to Have

- Experience testing AI- or LLM-backed features — evaluating nondeterministic outputs, prompt regression testing, latency budgets, and graceful degradation when model providers have issues
- Experience with application performance monitoring, distributed tracing, and cloud infrastructure metrics
- Experience building internal tooling that improves developer velocity

What Success Looks Like

- Fewer high-severity bugs reaching production and greater automated coverage of critical workflows
- Repeatable performance tests that identify scaling risks before they affect teachers and students, with clear baselines and capacity expectations for peak usage
- Faster, more confident releases and quality standards engineers respect rather than bypass
- A growing QA function and AI-assisted processes that meaningfully reduce manual effort

## What We Offer

- Competitive compensation and equity. For applicants in the US, the salary range for this role is $175,000 – $210,000, depending on relevant experience and skill set
- Medical, dental, vision and life insurance, including a medical insurance plan with 100% coverage of employee premiums
- Daily lunch credit through DoorDash in office + free DashPass to use anytime for work or personal use
- Wellhub Membership: 100% company-paid access to premium gym networks (Orangetheory, SoulCycle), 60+ wellness apps (Headspace, MyFitnessPal, Apple Fitness+), and 1:1 coaching sessions spanning fitness, mental health, nutrition, and sleep
- 401(k) matching
- Pet friendly office 🐶

## 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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