About the role
We’re looking for a Senior QA Engineer on a part-time basis for a long-term engagement with a US startup. The product is an iOS app that works together with a physical device and uses AI. The company is pre-launch.
You’ll be the only QA on the project. That means full ownership of quality: you decide what gets tested and how, you build the process from the ground up, and you work in close contact with the startup’s technical team.
This is not a role for executing someone else’s test cases. If you need an established process to slot into, this isn’t the position.
Schedule - please read carefully
The team is based in San Francisco, a 10-hour time difference. Because of that:
- Working hours shift into the evening - roughly until 9-10 PM Kyiv time
- Calls with the team two to three times per week at the start, one to two later on
- Everything else is async, you plan your own day
- Evening availability on agreed days is mandatory and not open for renegotiation after you start
If evening hours don’t work for you, it’s better not to spend time applying.
Requirements
Building processes from scratch
- Experience joining a project with no QA in place and building everything yourself
- Ability to set up a manual process from zero: critical flow map, test plan, regression suite, release checklist, bug workflow
- Ability to design an automation process from zero: choose the stack, lay out the framework architecture, wire tests into CI
- Ability to set testing priorities independently rather than waiting for tickets
Manual testing
- Deep experience testing mobile applications, with a focus on iOS
- Testing on physical devices, not only in the simulator
- Working with TestFlight, builds, and multiple iOS versions
- Verifying app permissions: microphone, Bluetooth, notifications, background behaviour
Automation
- 3+ years of commercial automation experience
- Experience automating native mobile apps, iOS preferred
- Proficiency with one of the following: Appium, WebdriverIO, XCUITest
- Ability to read and audit someone else’s test code, not just write from scratch
- Experience with CI/CD and how tests live inside a pipeline
AI testing
- Hands-on experience testing products with an LLM or ML underneath
- Understanding of how to verify non-deterministic output, where there is no single correct answer to assert against
- Experience with evaluation sets, scoring response quality, and catching regressions after a model or prompt change
- Familiarity with common failure modes: hallucinations, unstable responses, false refusals
API and backend
- Confident API testing with Postman or equivalent
- Ability to read logs and localise an issue to the device, the app, or the backend
- Working understanding of cloud services
Communication
- English at Advanced (C1) level or above — fluent spoken and written, no pauses to find words
- Comfortable holding technical discussions directly with a CTO
- Self-driven: nobody will hand you tasks every morning
Strong pluses
- Experience testing products where an app works together with a physical device
- Understanding of BLE: pairing, reconnection, behaviour on connection loss, data sync
- Experience with OTA firmware updates delivered through an app
- Working with audio as test data
- Experience at early-stage startups where processes don’t exist yet and have to be created
- Crash and feedback triage during beta, with Sentry or Crashlytics
- Understanding of privacy requirements: verifying data deletion and recording indicators
What you’ll be doing
- Regression testing ahead of weekly releases
- Feature testing before go-live
- Exploratory testing across device → cloud → app
- Building the QA process from scratch and growing it over time
- Auditing existing automated tests and gradually extending them
- Bug and crash triage during beta
What we offer
- Long-term engagement with the prospect of scaling up to full-time
- Real influence on the quality of a product that hasn’t launched yet
- Flexible schedule within the evening availability window
- Support from our team at every stage