QA Specialist

Department: Engineering

Reports To: Director of Engineering

Job Location: Remote

Supervisory Responsibility: Varies by level (see below)

Summary of Position:

The Quality Assurance Specialist is a key member of the Engineering Team. This is a hands-on, manual testing role where deep familiarity with school nutrition operations is a core advantage — you’ll use that domain knowledge to anticipate edge cases, validate compliance-driven workflows, and think critically about how real districts use our software. You should be inquisitive, thorough, and able to break down complex problems methodically. You’ll partner with other members of the cross functional team to ensure the quality, accuracy, and reliability of our products, with an emphasis on catching the subtle, real-world scenarios automated tests miss. The ultimate goal of this role is to ensure the integrity of our technology solutions and that they support the company’s overall strategy and goals. 

Core Responsibilities:

• Quality Standards: Design and maintain clear, well-documented test cases, test plans, and exploratory testing charters. Help enforce quality gates that prevent defects from reaching production. 
• Domain-Informed Testing: Apply knowledge of federal meal programs, menu planning, supply chain and district workflows to design realistic test scenarios, identify high-risk edge cases, and validate that features behave correctly under real-world compliance and operational conditions. 
• Department Collaboration & Strategy:    Partner with Product Managers, Software Engineers, and other QA team members to understand requirements and acceptance criteria. Participate in agile ceremonies including sprint planning, daily scrums, and retrospectives to ensure quality is built into every stage of development.
• Customer Success Collaboration & Strategy:  Partner and support the Customer Success team to strengthen the product/customer feedback loop. This includes reviewing the escalated support bug tickets, creation of engineering tickets, assigning as hotfix or to a sprint, and QA once resolved. Manages the bug backlog and ensures timely fixes.
• Defect Management & Reporting:    Identify, document, and track defects with clear reproduction steps and supporting evidence. Analyze test results, report on quality metrics, and work with engineers to validate fixes and prevent regressions.
• Continuous Improvement:    Stay current with emerging QA tools, methodologies, and industry best practices to continuously improve the team’s testing approach and toolset.

Level Differentiation

This role exists across multiple levels, with increasing ownership of QA strategy, complexity, leadership, and team development at each level.

QA Specialist

• Learns and applies QA processes and practices, contributing to QA strategy and test coverage work across their assigned cross-functional team.

Senior QA Specialist

• Independently owns testing for complex features and releases, contributes to QA strategy and test coverage decisions, leads quality work across assigned cross-functional team, and mentors QA Specialists 

Principal QA Manager

• Leads quality for the company’s most complex and compliance-critical initiatives, shapes QA strategy, establishes testing standards and practices across the department, and formally supervises and develops QA team members 

*Promotion is based on demonstrated competency, scope, independence, and sustained performance and experience.

Desired Qualifications and Skills: