QA Automation Manager

Kikoff • San Francisco, CA

8h • Hybrid

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

• Lead & Hire
• 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
• Build Quality Capability & Processes
• 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
• Enable & Scale
• 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)

Benefits

• Competitive pay based on experience
• 🏥 Medical, dental, and vision coverage - Kikoff covers the full cost of health insurance for the employee!
• 📈 Meaningful equity in the form of RSU's
• 🏝 Flexible vacation policy to help you recharge
• 💰 US salary range for this full-time position consists of base + equity + benefits

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Manager
• Education Level: No Education Listed
• Number of Employees: 101-250 employees