Kikoff: A FinTech Unicorn Powering Financial Progress with AI
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.
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
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)
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 HAVE
Fintech or regulated industry experience
Mobile test automation experience
Infrastructure-as-code familiarity (Pulumi, Terraform)
Accessibility testing experience
Open source testing framework contributions
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.
Top Skills
Kikoff San Francisco, California, USA Office
We’re headquartered in the Financial District of San Francisco where public transit is just a short walk away at Embarcadero Station.
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