Senior Quality Assurance Engineer at BusRight in San Francisco, CA

At BusRight, we're transforming an industry that has relied on outdated systems for far too long. School transportation is a critical part of everyday life for millions of students and families, yet much of the industry still depends on fragmented, manual processes.

We’re building a modern transportation platform that makes school buses safer, smarter, and more efficient for students, families, schools, and communities nationwide.

Our product ecosystem spans web, mobile, backend, mapping, real-time systems, and integrations. As a Senior Quality Assurance Engineer, you’ll take a leading role in ensuring the reliability, performance, and overall quality of that ecosystem.

This role goes beyond executing test cases. You’ll help define how we approach quality, identify risks before they become customer problems, investigate complex production issues, improve automation and tooling, and influence engineering practices across teams.

Why This Role Matters

You’ll join an established QA function and help take it to the next level.

We’re looking for someone who can operate independently, make sound quality and risk decisions, and act as a trusted technical partner to engineering and product teams.

You’ll work across the entire development lifecycle—from requirements and technical design through implementation, release, production monitoring, and incident investigation.

You’ll be expected to question assumptions, uncover difficult edge cases, identify systemic quality risks, and improve how we test and ship software.

This is a hands-on senior role. You’ll still test products directly, but you’ll also help shape test strategy, automation, tooling, processes, and quality standards across the organization.

What You’ll Do

Own Quality Across Complex Product Areas

• Take ownership of quality for complex features and product areas across Web, Android, and Flutter applications.
• Define appropriate test strategies based on technical complexity, customer impact, risk, and system architecture.
• Perform exploratory, integration, regression, and end-to-end testing across interconnected systems.
• Identify edge cases, failure modes, and risks that may not be obvious from product requirements alone.
• Help teams determine appropriate release confidence and identify gaps before changes reach production.

Investigate Complex Problems

• Lead investigation of difficult bugs and production issues across frontend, mobile, backend, infrastructure, and third-party integrations.
• Analyze application logs, network traffic, API requests, database data, monitoring signals, and source code to isolate root causes.
• Reproduce complex or intermittent issues and provide engineers with clear technical findings.
• Distinguish symptoms from underlying causes and identify patterns across seemingly unrelated incidents.
• Build scripts, utilities, or debugging tools when they can accelerate investigation or improve future troubleshooting.

Drive Test Automation and Engineering Quality

• Design, build, and maintain E2E and integration automation using tools such as Playwright/Maestro/Appium.
• Identify where automation provides meaningful value and where manual or exploratory testing is more appropriate.
• Improve automation architecture, reliability, maintainability, and execution speed.
• Work with engineers to improve testability at the application and system level.
• Improve automated quality checks on CI/CD workflows.

Influence Engineering and Product Decisions

• Partner with engineers and product managers during planning and technical design to identify risks early.
• Challenge unclear requirements, assumptions, and implementation decisions when they introduce unnecessary quality risk.
• Communicate tradeoffs clearly and help teams make informed release decisions.
• Represent the customer and operational perspective during technical discussions.
• Collaborate closely with Support and other customer-facing teams when investigating reported issues.

Improve QA Processes and Quality Culture

• Identify weaknesses in existing QA processes and propose practical improvements.
• Improve test documentation, defect reporting, release validation, incident analysis, and quality metrics.
• Help establish scalable testing practices as the product and engineering organization grow.
• Share knowledge, provide technical guidance, and help less-experienced QA engineers develop stronger testing and debugging skills.
• Promote the idea that quality is a shared engineering responsibility rather than something owned only by QA.

Who We’re Looking For

Core Qualifications

• 5+ years of experience in Quality Assurance, Software Engineering in Test, or another strongly technical software quality role.
• Significant experience testing complex web and mobile applications involving multiple interconnected services.
• Advanced exploratory testing and risk-analysis skills.
• Strong experience investigating production issues using logs, APIs, databases, monitoring tools, and other technical signals.
• Hands-on experience with automated testing frameworks and methodologies.
• Strong programming and debugging skills—you should be comfortable reading, understanding, and navigating production codebases.
• Ability to write automation, debugging utilities, scripts, data-analysis tools, or other engineering support tooling when needed.
• Strong understanding of APIs, distributed systems, client-server architecture, and data flows between services.
• Strong understanding of the full Software Testing Life Cycle (STLC), from requirements analysis and test design through execution, release validation, and production monitoring.
• Experience working with defect tracking systems and test management practices.
• Understanding of software security and privacy considerations, including authentication, authorization, data handling, access control, and common OWASP risks.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills, including the ability to explain complex technical issues clearly to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.

Experience with mapping, GPS/location systems, real-time applications, or transportation technology is a strong plus.

Technical Background

Experience with some of the following technologies is useful, but expertise in every technology listed is not required. We value strong fundamentals and the ability to quickly understand unfamiliar systems.

• Web: React, TypeScript
• APIs & Backend: REST APIs, Node.js, PostgreSQL, Firebase
• Mobile: Android, Flutter
• Automation: Playwright, Maestro, Appium
• Observability & Debugging: Datadog, Sentry, Google Cloud Platform, Proxyman
• Data & Infrastructure: PostgreSQL, Redis, Firebase Firestore, Google Cloud Platform
• API tooling: Postman or similar tools
• Security: OWASP, authentication/authorization concepts, privacy and data-handling practices
• Delivery: CI/CD pipelines, Agile software development practices
• Mapping / Location: GPS, geospatial systems, mapping SDKs, routing, or other location-based technologies

What Makes Someone Successful in This Role

• You naturally think in terms of risk, failure modes, and customer impact, not just expected behavior.
• You are comfortable investigating problems across multiple layers of a system.
• You can work independently when requirements are incomplete or the problem is poorly understood.
• You know when deeper investigation is necessary and when additional testing provides diminishing returns.
• You communicate quality concerns clearly without becoming a bottleneck for delivery.
• You are comfortable challenging assumptions and advocating for technical improvements.
• You look for opportunities to eliminate recurring problems rather than repeatedly testing around them.
• You enjoy building tools and processes that make engineering teams more effective.
• You balance attention to detail with pragmatic decision-making.