What are the responsibilities and job description for the QA Automation Manager position at Kikoff?
About The Role
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.
IN THIS ROLE, YOU WILL
Lead & Hire
At Kikoff, our mission is to provide radically affordable financial tools to help consumers achieve financial security. We're a profitable, high growth FinTech unicorn serving millions of people, many of whom are building credit or navigating life paycheck to paycheck. With innovative technology and AI, we simplify credit building, reduce debt, and expand access to financial opportunities to those who need them the most. Founded in 2019, Kikoff is headquartered in San Francisco and backed by top-tier VC investors and NBA star Stephen Curry.
Why Kikoff
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.
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
Location: Hybrid 3 days onsite in San Francisco, CA
Visa sponsorship available: Kikoff is willing to provide sponsorship for H1-B visas and U.S. green cards for exceptional talent.
Equal Employment Opportunity Statement
Kikoff Inc. is an equal opportunity employer. We are committed to complying with all federal, state, and local laws providing equal employment opportunities and considers qualified applicants without regard to race, color, religion, creed, gender, national origin, age, disability, veteran status, marital status, pregnancy, sex, gender expression or identity, sexual orientation, citizenship, or any other legally protected class.
Please reference the following for more information.
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.
IN THIS ROLE, YOU WILL
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
- 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)
- 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
- Fintech or regulated industry experience
- Mobile test automation experience
- Infrastructure-as-code familiarity (Pulumi, Terraform)
- Accessibility testing experience
- Open source testing framework contributions
At Kikoff, our mission is to provide radically affordable financial tools to help consumers achieve financial security. We're a profitable, high growth FinTech unicorn serving millions of people, many of whom are building credit or navigating life paycheck to paycheck. With innovative technology and AI, we simplify credit building, reduce debt, and expand access to financial opportunities to those who need them the most. Founded in 2019, Kikoff is headquartered in San Francisco and backed by top-tier VC investors and NBA star Stephen Curry.
Why Kikoff
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.
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
Location: Hybrid 3 days onsite in San Francisco, CA
Visa sponsorship available: Kikoff is willing to provide sponsorship for H1-B visas and U.S. green cards for exceptional talent.
Equal Employment Opportunity Statement
Kikoff Inc. is an equal opportunity employer. We are committed to complying with all federal, state, and local laws providing equal employment opportunities and considers qualified applicants without regard to race, color, religion, creed, gender, national origin, age, disability, veteran status, marital status, pregnancy, sex, gender expression or identity, sexual orientation, citizenship, or any other legally protected class.
Please reference the following for more information.