QA Manager

About the role

We are looking for an exceptionally skilled hands-on QA Manager to join our engineering team. This person will be responsible for managing the automation suites across all products in a fast-paced environment. Creating, maintaining, executing scripts during regression, smoke, and sanity in various environments. In your first year, you will have built out our testing frameworks from scratch and have hired a QA team to help us in those efforts!

Responsibilities

• Hands-on automation development that is AI native
• Managing an offshore QA team and building out a US team as needed
• Creating automated test and validation processes of APIs on cloud services
• Building comprehensive test suites that will be utilized by overall engineering and product organizations
• Recommending and maintaining appropriate frameworks to automate test scenarios
• Define testing and evaluation strategies for AI-powered features, including regression testing, output quality, reliability, edge cases, and non-deterministic behavior
• Analyzing and reporting on test automation progress
• Performing manual, exploratory and performance testing
• Analyzing test results, performing RCAs and file tickets as necessary in JIRA
• Establishing test automation code coverage metrics
• Collaborating closely with our product manager, project manager (agile), and software engineers to define best practices for testing our applications (both internal and external facing)

Qualifications

• 8+ years of QA engineering experience, including 2+ years leading or managing a test automation team
• Hands-on experience using AI tools and agents for test automation
• Strong expertise in automation tools such as Selenium, Playwright, Cypress, Watir, HeadSpin or similar
• Proven ability to define tool strategy and build scalable test automation frameworks from the ground up
• Experience writing scalable, reusable test scripts and running them in an Agile/Scrum environment
• Solid experience with manual and automated API testing, including Postman
• Experience setting up CI/CD pipelines and integrating automated tests into them
• Practical experience with source control systems (e.g., Git)
• Familiarity with AWS, GCP or similar cloud platforms, and working knowledge of SQL
• Excellent communication and mentorship skills, with experience leading distributed teams

How to be Successful

• Builder mentality: you’re energized by starting from zero. You can stand up frameworks, processes and a team from scratch without waiting for a playbook.
• Hands-on and leading at the same time: you’re as comfortable writing and debugging automation scripts as you are mentoring engineers and setting direction for the team.
• AI-native problem solving: you reach for AI tools and agents first to speed up test creation and maintenance, and you know how to test AI features whose outputs can change from run to run.
• Quality as a mindset, not a phase: you push testing earlier in the development cycle and help engineering and product teams own quality alongside you.
• Root-cause curiosity: you don’t stop at “it’s broken.” You dig into the “why,” run thorough RCAs and turn what you learn into lasting process fixes.
• Data-driven reporting: you track coverage, defect trends and automation progress, and you use those numbers to show impact and guide decisions.
• Pragmatic prioritization: in a fast-paced environment, you balance coverage, speed and risk. You know what to automate, what to test by hand and what can wait.
• Precision and attention to detail: you catch the edge cases others miss and won’t sign off on a release until you trust the results.
• Clear communication across time zones: you keep an offshore team aligned and productive, and you explain quality risks so non-technical stakeholders understand them.
• Voice your opinions: how can we make our products, releases and engineering practices better based on what testing shows you?

Nice to Have (but not mandatory)

• Degree in Computer Science, Engineering or a related field (or equivalent experience)
• QA or testing certifications (e.g., ISTQB) or cloud certifications (AWS/GCP)
• Experience with performance and load testing tools (e.g., JMeter, k6, Locust)
• Eastern Time Zone location for easier collaboration with the team and offshore partners

Why Join Knotch

You will be the founding leader of quality at Knotch, building our testing frameworks, automation suites and QA team from the ground up. Your work will shape how every product is built, tested and released, so our engineering and product teams can ship faster and with confidence. You’ll work with AI-native tools, cloud-based products and a talented team that values ownership, precision and impact.

The expected salary range for this opportunity is $104,000-138,000 CAD depending on skills and experience.

Our Benefits and Perks

Knotch is a fully remote company. Candidates may work from anywhere within Canada, with Eastern time zone preferred, through our employer of record. Some of our other great benefits include:

• Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision insurance eligibility
• 401(k) plan
• Unlimited PTO
• 10+ company-paid holidays
• Monthly wellness stipend
• A daily company-wide break, and more!

Equal Opportunity Employer

Knotch is a US-based equal opportunity employer. We strive to provide equal opportunities in all of our processes, including our hiring and employee experience. We pride ourselves on our three values: transparency, relentlessness, and inclusiveness.

We commit to daily work towards leading with empathy, reducing bias through periodic training, and engaging with and uplifting communities of marginalized groups. We condemn all forms of racism and discrimination on the basis of race, religion, ethnicity, nationality, gender identity, sexual orientation, age, marital status, pregnancy or parenthood status, veteran status, disability status, or any other identifier. We encourage all employees, clients, investors, candidates, vendors, and friends of Knotch to deliver honest feedback directly or anonymously so that we may always seek to improve as an organization dedicated to diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging.