Quality Assurance Engineer

STAR Autism Support has an opening for Quality Assurance Engineer!

STAR Autism Support (SAS) is a family-founded educational consulting company based in Portland, OR. SAS provides curriculum materials, workshops and training to school and agency staff who work with students with autism and other developmental disabilities. Our unique and practical approach provides school districts with curriculum resources and a continuum of professional development activities to address the educational needs of student’s early childhood through post-secondary throughout the country and internationally. At SAS our goal is to cultivate a supportive, positive and welcoming work environment where all staff can successfully thrive. We value and celebrate equity, diversity, and inclusion. Our vision of equity includes a continuous commitment to becoming an antiracist, multicultural organization. We strive to provide all employees with a culture of curiosity and continued learning.

Position Summary/Objective

Star Autism Support builds curriculum, training, and software for educators teaching students with autism and developmental disabilities. Our software gets used in classrooms by teachers and paraprofessionals who have a few minutes between activities. A confusing screen or a slow data page costs them time with a student. 

This is our first dedicated QA hire. You will build our automated test coverage from the ground up, run usability and performance testing, and set the quality practices the product development team works to. That means choosing tooling and standards yourself, and working embedded with the team rather than as a gate at the end. 

Essential Functions and Responsibilities

Functional testing and automation 

• Build and own automated regression suites for our web apps and APIs, wired into CI. 
• Decide what belongs in unit, integration, contract, and end-to-end tests, and push coverage to the cheapest layer that catches the problem. 
• Write test code other engineers can read and extend. Fix or delete flaky tests rather than retrying them. 
• Run exploratory and risk-based manual testing where automation is not the right tool. 
• Own release verification: smoke suites, environment checks, and a clear go/no-go call. 

User testing 

• Plan and run usability testing with educators and internal subject-matter experts, from task scripts through to findings. 
• Work with product and design on UAT, including feedback cycles with pilot districts and classrooms. 
• Own accessibility testing against WCAG 2.2 AA and Section 508, using automated scanners plus manual screen-reader and keyboard-only passes. This matters more here than at most companies. 
• Turn findings into prioritized issues rather than a list of observations. 

Performance testing 

• Build load, stress, soak, and spike tests, with attention to back-to-school traffic peaks. 
• Set performance baselines and SLOs and track them so regressions show up before customers find them. 
• Help diagnose bottlenecks: slow queries, N+1 patterns, payload bloat, front-end render cost. 
• Report results leadership can act on: response times at percentile, error rates under load, remaining headroom. 

Best practices and enablement 

• Document and maintain testing standards, test data strategy, bug reporting conventions, and definition of done. 
• Coach engineers to test their own work. The goal is a team that ships quality, not a QA bottleneck. 
• Report quality metrics: escaped defects, coverage of critical paths, suite reliability. 
• Contribute to release process, code review, and CI/CD design from a quality angle. 
• Keep FERPA and COPPA considerations in view where they touch test data.

Qualifications 

Required

• 5+ years in software quality engineering or QA automation. 
• Ownership of an automated test suite you built or substantially rebuilt, not just executed. 
• Proficiency in at least one automation language (JavaScript/TypeScript, Python, Java, or C#). 
• Experience with a modern end-to-end framework such as Playwright or Cypress. 
• Hands-on API testing, including auth flows and data setup. 
• Experience running performance or load tests with a code-based tool such as Gatling or k6. 
• Experience planning and moderating user or usability testing sessions. 
• Comfort with CI/CD pipelines and Git workflows. 
• Strong writing. This role produces documentation people have to use. 
• Ability to set your own priorities without an existing playbook. 

Preferred

• Accessibility testing against WCAG and Section 508, including screen readers. 
• EdTech, K–12, healthcare, or another domain with real compliance and privacy constraints. 
• Mobile and tablet testing. Much classroom use is on iPads and Chromebooks. 
• Visual regression, contract testing, or synthetic monitoring in production. 
• Cloud infrastructure and containerized test environments. 
• Mentoring engineers on testing practice, or standing up a QA function previously. 
• Interest in special education, applied behavior analysis, or accessibility. 

Tools

Examples of what we mean by each area. We are open to your recommendations on what we adopt.

Area

Tools

Web / UI automation

Playwright, Cypress

Mobile automation

Appium

API testing

Postman, REST-assured

Test frameworks

Jest, Pytest

Performance & load

Gatling, k6

Accessibility

axe DevTools, NVDA

Cross-browser & devices

BrowserStack

Visual regression

Percy

User testing

UserTesting, Maze

CI/CD

GitHub Actions, Azure DevOps

Test & defect management

Jira, TestRail

Observability

Datadog, Sentry

What to Expect in the First Year

• 30 days: An honest read on where quality breaks down today.
• 90 days: Automated smoke and regression coverage in CI for our critical user journeys, plus an agreed test strategy.
• 6 to 12 months: Regression coverage across core products, a performance baseline with recurring load tests, a usability testing cadence, and escaped defects trending down.

Role Details

• Department: Technology
• Reports to: Chief Technology Officer
• Location: Remote, United States
• Type: Full-Time, Exempt
• Compensation: Annual Base Salary of $90,000 - $110,000

Knowledge, Skills, and Abilities

Organizational KSA’s

• Strong verbal and written business communication skills
• Strong interpersonal skills with the ability to collaborate effectively
• Has a growth mindset, is curious, and interested in ongoing learning and development
• Adaptable and easily able to pivot as needed
• Strong organizational skills and attention to detail 
• Self-motivated and proficient at working both independently and as part of a team
• Intermediate Microsoft office skills and competence in a digital environment 
• Ability to streamline workflows by leveraging automation and AI tools to enhance efficiency and accuracy

Role KSA’s

• Advanced knowledge of software quality engineering and test automation. 
• Skill in building maintainable test suites within CI/CD pipelines. 
• Knowledge of functional, usability, accessibility, and performance testing.
• Ability to assess risk, diagnose issues, and prioritize findings. 
• Ability to establish scalable quality standards, metrics, and release practices. 
• Skill in collaborating across technical and nontechnical teams. 
• Knowledge of privacy and data-handling requirements in educational technology.
• Ability to independently select tools, set priorities, and build QA practices.

Work Environment 

The work environment characteristics described here are representative of those an employee encounters while performing the essential functions of this job. Reasonable accommodation may be made to enable individuals with disabilities to perform the essential functions.

The job is performed in a home office at a workstation with a telephone, headset, and computer. Home offices should be secure, quiet, and distraction-free as possible. Your work area should be ergonomic, clean, safe, and free of obstructions and hazardous situations. 

Physical Demands (Capability Requirements)

The physical demands described here are representative of those that must be met by an employee to successfully perform the essential functions of this job. Reasonable accommodation may be made to enable individuals with disabilities to perform the essential functions. While performing the duties of this job, the employee is regularly required to enter text or data into a  computer by means of a keyboard. The employee is required to sit for long periods of time. The employee is required to express or exchange ideas verbally to impart oral information and to convey detailed spoken instructions. Specific vision abilities required by this job include clarity of vision including reading small print and the use of computers. Specific hearing abilities required include the ability to hear, understand, and distinguish speech in person and over the phone. 

The perks of working with us

Not only are you helping do good in the world, but you will be joining a team of passionate and exceptional people within a casual environment. We offer a full suite of benefits including:

• Retirement plan options with company matching
• Generous paid time off, including paid holidays and office closure days
• Paid COVID-19 sick leave
• Health Insurance Coverage (Medical, Dental, Vision, and Flexible Spending Accounts)
• Life and Disability Insurance options
• Employee Assistance Program

We are a proud Equal Opportunity Employer. STAR Autism Support (SAS) is committed to the principles of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). We celebrate the differences that make each person unique, both at work and in the communities we serve. Using evidence-based practices we strive every day to make positive educational outcomes accessible to all students and educators. This commitment is also foundational to our company culture. We acknowledge that research shows that Black, Indigenous and people of color (BIPOC) and women are significantly less likely to apply for some positions, believing they must meet every qualification as described in the job description. At STAR Autism Support, we value representation, and we are most interested in finding the best candidate for the job. We know that sometimes that candidate may be one who comes from a less traditional background. We encourage you to apply, even if you don't believe you meet every one of the qualifications described in the job description.