Quality Assurance Manager

Quality Assurance Manager 

About Kadince

Kadince (pronounced cadence) is a fully remote software company founded in 2013. In a nutshell, we build tools to help compliance and marketing professionals at financial institutions do their jobs more efficiently.

Kadince has been profitable for several years (we’re fans of making more than we spend). We’re bootstrapped, which means we don’t have investors. So our owners answer to no one. And they aren’t just giving us commands from their vacation homes waiting to cash their next check. They’re fellow team members and in the trenches with us. 

Why We’re Hiring

After our team members, our customers are our most important focus. As our customer base grows, so does our team. We’re dedicated to giving each customer the best experience possible, which means having enough people to take care of all their needs. We’re growing quickly and so are the needs of our customers. That’s why we’re increasing the size of our quality assurance team.

Who We Want to Hire

To be a Quality Assurance Manager at Kadince you should have 5+ years of experience in QA engineering, SDET, or software development, with experience both leading QA efforts and working hands-on with automated tests. You can balance planning and executing test strategies, creating and maintaining robust test suites, preparing releases, and performing root cause analysis when defects occur.

This is a hands-on leadership role. You will manage and mentor QA engineers, but you will also stay close to the code, test architecture, and CI pipelines. We’re looking for someone who can operate autonomously day to day, while collaborating closely with the Director of Development on standards, strategy, and continuous improvement.

You balance planning and execution, owning test strategies, improving automation and pipelines, preparing releases, and performing root cause analysis when defects occur. You are comfortable going deep technically when needed and know how to translate issues into clear actions for both QA and engineering teams.

You excel at identifying inefficiencies, solving hard problems, and improving quality systems over time. You understand that high-quality software comes from strong feedback loops, clear standards, and thoughtful tradeoffs; not just more tests.

You’re excited to collaborate with managers, developers, and the product team to continuously improve quality standards, feedback loops, and delivery confidence. You know that the best way to ensure quality is by testing, testing, and more testing. The idea of consistent improvement doesn’t scare you, and you are as detail-oriented and proactive as they come. 

You have a desire to continually learn and improve your own QA skills. We love giving team members opportunities to improve their skills, whether through online courses, workshops, or learning from others.

You’re able to adapt quickly to new environments, are organized and focused, can look beyond current constraints, and can provide solutions to complex problems. 

Our vision, mission, and core values should resonate with you. That’ll be crucial to your success and happiness if you join the Kadince team.

Let’s Geek Out

If you’re geeky like our dev team (hopefully you are), you probably want to know more about our tech-stack. Outside of our dev team, we’re not really sure what most of this means, but we sure hope you do.

Technologies/Frameworks

• Ruby on Rails
• GraphQL
• Postgres
• Redis
• React
• Minitest
• Cypress

DevOps

• Kubernetes
• Helm
• Docker
• Bitbucket Pipelines
• CircleCI

Other Tools

• Jira
• Rubymine
• Sentry

Our Vision and Mission 

Our vision and mission aren’t something we hung on the office wall and forgot about. Seriously, we don’t have an office, let alone a wall to hang them on. But our vision, mission, and core values sit on the desks of each of our team members. And we discuss them regularly in our meetings. Your goals and Key Performance Indicator (KPI) will be developed to ensure you’re working to help us achieve our vision and mission.

Our vision and mission are what get us up each morning. They, in addition to our core values, help us make decisions. 

Vision - Setting the standard for operating a great software company.

We’re big fans of author Jim Collins and his best-selling book, Good to Great (bonus points if you’ve read it). While there are lots of good software companies out there, we want to be one of the great ones.

The first word of our vision is also significant. To go “high school English class” on you, the present participle “setting” illustrates that we’re not looking to set the standard and then be done, but that the standard is always moving and we’re always chasing it. We continually stop to recognize the awesome things we’ve done and then look for ways to do them even better. 

Mission - Building the best software for compliance and marketing professionals at financial institutions.

As Jim Collins taught in his Hedgehog Concept (told you we think he’s great—pun intended), great companies need to determine what they can be the best at in the world and focus on that. There are so many things we could solve as a software company, but we’ve found what we think we can be the best in the world at and we stick to it every day. 

Our Core Values

Our core values remind us who we are. They also guide us in the decisions we make. They’re listed in order of importance. If we have a question when making a decision about people, for example, we look to the core value above it to make our decision. 

1. Integrity - We’re honest with ourselves and others.
2. People - We understand that people are the foundation of Kadince and we act accordingly.
3. Care - We love what we do and do it consistently and intentionally to the best of our abilities.
4. Remarkability - We provide remarkable experiences to all who come into contact with Kadince.
5. Growth - We accept yesterday and improve today.

What a Day in the Life of a Quality Assurance Manager Looks Like

Your day starts with a development team meeting where your leader goes through announcements, syncs up projects, and discusses any potential issues. 

A big software update is being pushed today, and you actively monitor Sentry logs to catch any errors or anomalies in real time. You notice a few bugs and report them to the team. They jump on top of it and take care of them in no time. After compiling a brief report on defect metrics—highlighting the bugs discovered, their severity, and the response time—you share it with the team in Slack. Now everyone is informed on how the release went.

You jump into Jira, where you plan and prioritize both manual and automated tests, triage bugs, manage QA workload, and make sure each ticket has clearly defined testing and acceptance requirements. You do some QA and manually test a couple of the changes your team made today, ensuring that everything got done that needed to. You write automated tests to ensure the functionality that was just worked on. You find one little bug, which you log and then assign to another developer. You also keep an eye on CI test performance and reliability, identifying slow or flaky tests and working to improve pipeline speed and feedback.

You spend some time training a new developer, guiding him through the QA process for identifying, triaging, and fixing routine bugs. They’re still learning your team’s workflows and processes, but overall, they’re doing really well. You post a quick shoutout in the company Slack channel thanking them for being so on top of it today. Many of your team members respond to your shoutout with party emojis and hearts. 

For lunch, you meet a friend at the cafe near his work. You haven’t seen your friend for a few months, so you talk about life and your careers. You can’t help but feel very lucky for the freedom you have to take a long lunch break and meet your friend, as he has to hurry back to the office and get working right at the hour. 

Back at home, you begin planning out test scenarios for upcoming features. You meet with fellow QA engineers, where you discuss ongoing test strategies, refine acceptance criteria, and plan out which areas of the product need extra focus. This meeting is full of laughter, but jokes aside, you have really productive conversations and find yourself very grateful to be surrounded by others who share your same love for quality assurance. 

You take a break to join a development team meeting where you share testing updates, sync up on projects, and discuss any potential issues that might block development or QA. After the meeting, you join a code review session to review code quality and test coverage. 

Now you work on a document that outlines QA best practices and guidelines. You want to share this document with your team next week, and you just need to put the final touches. It’s important to have standardized processes, and you know that the best way to standardize something is to document and train.

You finish your day by taking a look at tomorrow’s schedule and planning accordingly. By day’s end, you feel confident that the proactive QA measures taken have kept this release running smoothly, and you look forward to seeing what tomorrow brings.

When and Where You’d Work and What You’d Work On

Kadince is a principle-based company, which means we focus on principles, not policies. You’ll work with your leader, Josh Parsons, each week to review your goals/KPI and what you’ve been working on. You’ll meet regularly with the Development team to learn, keep projects on track, and ensure that goals/KPIs are being reached.

While we aren’t super particular about when and where you work, you’ll need to work around the schedules of other team members to ensure that goals stay on track and nothing falls through the cracks. Overall, your schedule needs to help you achieve our vision and mission and demonstrate our core values. After all, this is a full-time job, and we treat it that way! 

At Kadince, work won’t tie you down to one location. You’ll have the flexibility to work remotely and even change locations from time to time. Want to spend a few weeks somewhere new—maybe exploring a different state or another country? That’s totally possible, as long as it’s approved by HR ahead of time to make sure everything’s good from a legal and tax standpoint. Just make sure that wherever you plan to work has a reliable internet connection of at least 10 Mbps download and 1-2 Mbps upload (as if you would go anywhere without it anyway).

Who You’d Be Working With

We have over 50 team members (which makes us really happy since Kadince was started by two people in their basements). If hired, you’ll probably work with each team member in one way or another. Some of the people you’ll work with most frequently are:

Josh is our awesome Director of Development. He’s in charge of a team of developers and makes sure that his team knows what needs to be done. He likes to program so much that he even does it in his free time. According to Josh, he’s been a pizza man, an ice cream man, a grocery man, and a manly man (we’re not so sure about the manly man).

Scott is our Director of Product, which means he helps decide what new features we should develop based on customer and team feedback. He’s been at Kadince longer than almost anyone. He has a head full of random facts and loves to share them with his teammates. Scott has had over 25 jobs, which makes him sound a lot older than he is! He’s mostly worked in construction, but he once had a job as an algae harvester (what even is that?). He may not know how to swim, but that doesn’t stop him from “diving” right into each new project.

Daniel is a junior web developer who likes to play with bugs. (Software bugs, not real ones. Or maybe he likes real ones too. Who knows?) Daniel lives in Massachusetts and is officially the youngest member of the Kadince team. He’s fresh out of high school! Daniel loves programming, playing games with friends, and exploring the outdoors. Daniel may not say much when you first meet him, but he’s a great guy to talk to and will always have your back. If Daniel could do anything, he’d take his closest friends to Japan or Rome. Better become friends with him! 

Benefits

Since we’re a remote company, we don’t offer office snacks and ping pong tables. But if you’re a fan of “core benefits” that bring great rewards and peace of mind, you’ll like what we have to offer. Competitive pay, 401(k) matching, generous paid leave, insurance (medical, dental, vision, life, short-term disability), and a flex spending account. Yeah, it’s pretty great... 

And we love to spoil our team. We celebrate big events with you, like birthdays and work anniversaries, so you can expect some pretty fun gifts. We once sent some high-quality lip balm to each team member so we could all play a prank on Scott, our Director of Product. We’re fun like that. And this year we’re giving every team member the last week of the year off (we like to spread holiday cheer). 

How to Apply 

Applicants who stand out are those who are interested in working for Kadince, not just applying for as many positions as possible or trying to keep unemployment benefits. We’ve seen it all. No kidding, we once had someone ask us in an interview what the name of our company is. Needless to say, we could tell that person wasn’t really passionate about joining our team.

When applying to Kadince, please send us a PDF of your resume. The questions below are your opportunity to tell us why you would be a great fit for the position. Take advantage of this time. Seriously, sell yourself! 

Thank you for your interest in Kadince. We look forward to reviewing your application.

This position is open to candidates living in AL, AK, AZ, AR, CT, DE, FL, GA, HI, IA, ID, IL, IN, KS, KY, LA, ME, MD, MA, MI, MN, MS, MO, NE, NV, NH, NM, NC, ND, OH, OK, PA, RI, SC, SD, TN, TX, UT, VT, VA, WV, WI, and WY.

Kadince, Inc. is an Equal Employment Opportunity Employer.