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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
What We Do
Kikoff is a personal finance platform that offers the simplest credit-building solution out there: $0 fees, 0% interest, and no credit pull. Your credit score is the foundation of your financial health – yet most people don’t have the credit score they deserve. That’s why Kikoff built the most accessible and affordable credit-building solution – it’s also the fastest growing and the top-rated credit building mobile app. Kikoff works whether you’re new to credit or looking for an extra boost. Building credit is just the start; Kikoff is building a personal finance platform designed to help consumers achieve financial wellness. Driven by the co-founders’ and team’s personal experiences, Kikoff’s mission is to provide refreshingly fair, effective, and simple pathways to meet your financial goals. Kikoff is a Series B company and has raised over $42 million in total funding. Investors include Portage Ventures, Lightspeed Venture Partners, GGV, Coatue, Core Innovation Capital, and basketball star Stephen Curry. Kikoff was founded in 2019 and is headquartered in San Francisco, California.
Why Work With Us
We are building an organization that maximizes growth and learning; we are invested in helping you grow and achieve what you want in your career. Our principles include a bias towards action, work in public, first principles thinking, intellectual honesty and extreme ownership.
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