QA Automation Manager

Kikoff•San Francisco, CA

9h•$200,000 - $240,000

About The Position

You will be our first QA Automation Manager at Kikoff, a fintech company building products that help Americans build credit. With millions of users trusting our platform, quality isn't just important - it is essential to our mission. This is a rare ground-floor opportunity: you will have full ownership to define testing strategy, build automation frameworks from scratch, establish quality processes, and create tools that enable product teams to own quality at scale. This is a player-coach role: you'll write code, build infrastructure, and hire your team.

Requirements

7+ years quality engineering, 3+ years building test automation and quality processes from scratch
2+ years of management experience
Player-coach experience: built frameworks while hiring and leading teams
Expert in test automation frameworks (Selenium, Playwright, Cypress, Appium)
Strong coding ability in Ruby, JavaScript/TypeScript, Python, or similar
CI/CD integration experience (GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Jenkins)
Experience with UI/UX test automation and visual regression testing
Performance testing tools (JMeter, k6, Gatling)
Built internal testing platforms and quality processes that teams actually adopted
Can influence without authority—you enable, don't gatekeep
Self-starter who builds programs from ambiguity

Nice To Haves

Fintech or regulated industry experience
Mobile test automation experience
Infrastructure-as-code familiarity (Pulumi, Terraform)
Accessibility testing experience
Open source testing framework contributions

Responsibilities

Build your quality engineering team from the ground up
Collaborate with InfoSec Manager on compliance testing (SOC 2, PCI-DSS)
Advise Core Platform and product teams on production monitoring
Report quality metrics and program maturity to leadership
Design test automation frameworks for backend (Ruby), web (JS), and mobile (Dart/Flutter)
Expand automated testing from current unit test coverage to integration, e2e, and UI/UX automation
Establish quality processes: testing standards, code review practices, defect workflows
Create self-service testing tools that product teams adopt independently
Build contract testing, integration testing, performance testing, and visual regression capabilities
Partner with Core Platform on ephemeral environments and local execution automation
Integrate testing seamlessly into CI/CD pipelines
Train product engineers on testing frameworks and quality practices
Build documentation and runbooks that empower self-service
Drive adoption through metrics: coverage gaps, flaky tests, execution performance, quality trends
Automate everything—start manual where needed, systematically eliminate it
Identify and close quality gaps not covered by product teams (especially UI/UX flows)