Quality Assurance Analyst

Who You Are

You are passionate about helping students achieve their educational goals. You thrive in a competitive and collaborative team environment. You are comfortable working remotely and have experience collaborating with others in a virtual environment. You possess a strong attention to detail.

The Quality Assurance Analyst ensures the quality, reliability, accessibility, and performance of technology solutions through structured testing, defect management, and continuous improvement practices. This role develops and executes test strategies, test plans, test cases, and regression testing activities to validate that applications satisfy business, functional, integration, security, and user experience requirements. The QA Analyst partners closely with software developers, product owners, business stakeholders, and project teams to identify defects early, improve release quality, and support successful technology delivery. The role also contributes to establishing repeatable quality assurance standards, testing frameworks, metrics, and release readiness reporting.

Compensation

ACE is committed to paying a competitive wage while staying true to our mission of maintaining high quality, affordable programs for our students. The starting salary range for this position is $85,000 plus all full-time employees are eligible for an annual bonus. Offers vary depending on education, prior experience, and expertise being applied to the role.

What We Look for in the Ideal Candidate

• Demonstrates self-reliance by meeting/exceeding workflow needs.
• Demonstrates positive attitude and motivation, concern for students, teamwork, and excellent time management skills.
• Follows established processes as outlined by organization and leadership.
• Completes assigned duties based on daily business needs and individual skill set.
• Consistently produces a high volume of quality work.
• Capable, adapts as needed, to work under pressure and meet tight deadlines.
• Proven ability to work independently with limited supervision and with other department personnel.
• Impact mission to improve the people and communities we serve through our civic engagement initiatives.
• Must have exceptional communication, organization, and time management skills.
• Must be "self-motivated" as well as creative and efficient in proposing solutions to complex, time-critical problems.
• Must be collaborative in driving decisions and a team-player.
• Strong analytical and problem-solving skills with a high attention to detail.
• Builds and maintains student satisfaction.
• Recognizes and anticipates student needs.

Day to Day Responsibilities

In this role you will wear different hats, but your skills will be especially essential in the following areas:

• Develops, maintains, and executes test plans, test cases, and test scripts that are traceable to business requirements, acceptance criteria, and expected user outcomes.
• Performs functional, regression, integration, user acceptance, and exploratory testing activities.
• Documents, tracks, prioritizes, and validates resolution of defects using established defect management processes.
• Collaborates with developers, product owners, and business stakeholders to clarify requirements and define acceptance criteria.
• Participates in Agile ceremonies including backlog refinement, sprint planning, reviews, and retrospectives.
• Validates application performance, usability, accessibility, and overall user experience.
• Creates and maintains test data, testing documentation, and release readiness reports.
• Analyzes defect trends and testing metrics to identify opportunities for quality improvement.
• Supports release validation activities and provide QA readiness input to help determine whether technology solutions are prepared for production deployment.
• Ensures technology solutions meet established quality standards before production deployment.

Qualifications and Education Requirements:

• Computer Science, Information Systems, Business, or related field preferred or equivalent experience.
• 3+ years of experience in software quality assurance, software testing, integration testing, or application quality management.
• Experience creating and executing manual test plans, test cases, and defect management processes.
• Strong understanding of Agile development methodologies and software development lifecycle practices.
• Experience working with testing and defect tracking tools such as Azure DevOps, or similar platforms.
• Experience working with Student Information Systems and CRM platforms such as Dynamics 365 or Salesforce preferred.
• Knowledge of regression, integration, user acceptance, and exploratory testing techniques.
• Experience with API testing, integration validation, and basic SQL or data validation preferred.
• Strong analytical, troubleshooting, documentation, and problem-solving skills.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills with the ability to collaborate across technical and business teams.
• Hands-on experience with test automation tools, scripting, or automation frameworks preferred.
• ISTQB Certified Tester, Certified Agile Tester, or similar quality assurance certification preferred.

Our Commitment to Employees

Just as we strive to empower our students for success, we also aim to enrich the lives of our employees. For 6 medium-sized companies in 2020. In addition, ACE has earned national recognition, being named a USA Top Workplace in 2022, 2023 and 2024. As a virtual first organization, we celebrate diversity and are committed to creating a family-like inclusive work environment. For our full-time employees, we offer the following benefits:

• Medical, dental, & vision Insurance
• HSA and FSA options
• Paid parental leave
• Paid volunteer time
• Tuition reimbursement & reduction programs
• Generous PTO
• 401k and employer match
• Full-service wellness and EAP program
• Employee recognition and awards programs
• Employer paid life & AD&D insurance
• Short-term disability
• Employer paid long-term disability

Physical Demands

The physical demand described here are representative of those that must be met by an employee to successfully perform the essential functions of this job. While performing the duties of this job, the employee is regularly required to communicate with and receive communications from students and ACE employees in real time using online and other electronic media.

Commitment to Culture -of-a-kind, supportive community where everyone students, faculty, and staff can thrive. Guided by our mission and values, we focus on everything from innovative curriculum design to personalized instruction and student support to intentional planning, celebrates freedom of expression, diversity of thought, open dialogue, and mutual respect. We believe in fostering a sense of belonging and wellness so that every member of our ACE family feels empowered, learning community where everyone matters.

Additional Notes

This job description is not designed to cover or contain a comprehensive listing of activities, duties or responsibilities that are required of the employee for this job. Duties, responsibilities, and activities may change at any time with or without notice.

Employees are increasingly integrating AI into their roles, demonstrating its potential to boost efficiency, accuracy, and productivity. By utilizing AI technologies, we can streamline processes, gain valuable insights from data, and automate routine tasks, which allows employees to concentrate on more strategic and creative aspects of their work. While AI is a beneficial tool in the workplace, if its use such as ChatGPT, Grammarly, Copy.ai, etc. accounts for more than 50% of any work assignments or job responsibilities, it will need to be reported to a direct leader.

Internet bandwidth speeds from an employee's remote work location must be a minimum of 50Mbps download speeds and 5Mbps upload speeds. Please note if the bandwidth is shared across multiple devices (tablets, computer, streaming, phone, etc.) you will need higher overall speeds. You can test the speed of your connection by visiting speedtest.net Purchase, setup, installation, support, and ongoing maintenance of reliable internet service is the responsibility of the individual. American College of Education seeks to attract and retain a diverse staff consistent with its diverse student body and surrounding communities. At this time we cannot consider candidates residing in Alaska, Washington D.C., Massachusetts, South Dakota, or Alabama.

ACE is an Equal Opportunity Employer.