Quality Assurance Engineer

STAR Autism Support has an opening for Quality Assurance Engineer! STAR Autism Support (SAS) is a family-founded educational consulting company based in Portland, OR. SAS provides curriculum materials, workshops and training to school and agency staff who work with students with autism and other developmental disabilities. Our unique and practical approach provides school districts with curriculum resources and a continuum of professional development activities to address the educational needs of student’s early childhood through post-secondary throughout the country and internationally.

At SAS our goal is to cultivate a supportive, positive and welcoming work environment where all staff can successfully thrive. We value and celebrate equity, diversity, and inclusion. Our vision of equity includes a continuous commitment to becoming an antiracist, multicultural organization. We strive to provide all employees with a culture of curiosity and continued learning. **Position Summary/Objective** Star Autism Support builds curriculum, training, and software for educators teaching students with autism and developmental disabilities.

Our software gets used in classrooms by teachers and paraprofessionals who have a few minutes between activities. A confusing screen or a slow data page costs them time with a student. This is our first dedicated QA hire. You will build our automated test coverage from the ground up, run usability and performance testing, and set the quality practices the product development team works to. That means choosing tooling and standards yourself, and working embedded with the team rather than as a gate at the end.

**Essential Functions and Responsibilities** Functional testing and automation  - Build and own automated regression suites for our web apps and APIs, wired into CI. - Decide what belongs in unit, integration, contract, and end-to-end tests, and push coverage to the cheapest layer that catches the problem. - Write test code other engineers can read and extend. Fix or delete flaky tests rather than retrying them.

- Run exploratory and risk-based manual testing where automation is not the right tool. - Own release verification: smoke suites, environment checks, and a clear go/no-go call. User testing  - Plan and run usability testing with educators and internal subject-matter experts, from task scripts through to findings. - Work with product and design on UAT, including feedback cycles with pilot districts and classrooms.

- Own accessibility testing against WCAG 2.2 AA and Section 508, using automated scanners plus manual screen-reader and keyboard-only passes. This matters more here than at most companies. - Turn findings into prioritized issues rather than a list of observations. Performance testing  - Build load, stress, soak, and spike tests, with attention to back-to-school traffic peaks. - Set performance baselines and SLOs and track them so regressions show up before customers find them.

- Help diagnose bottlenecks: slow queries, N+1 patterns, payload bloat, front-end render cost. - Report results leadership can act on: response times at percentile, error rates under load, remaining headroom. Best practices and enablement  - Document and maintain testing standards, test data strategy, bug reporting conventions, and definition of done. - Coach engineers to test their own work. The goal is a team that ships quality, not a QA bottleneck.

- Report quality metrics: escaped defects, coverage of critical paths, suite reliability. - Contribute to release process, code review, and CI/CD design from a quality angle. - Keep FERPA and COPPA considerations in view where they touch test data. **Qualifications** Required - 5+ years in software quality engineering or QA automation. - Ownership of an automated test suite you built or substantially rebuilt, not just executed.

- Proficiency in at least one automation language (JavaScript/TypeScript, Python, Java, or C#). - Experience with a modern end-to-end fra