Quality Assurance Engineer (QA) - ThriveCart

About ThriveCart: ThriveCart is a powerful platform used by over 50,000 people worldwide to generate over $5B in sales. It includes a learning management system (LMS), affiliate management, cart and checkout functionality, and integrates with everything you use. ThriveCart is the highest-converting cart for online businesses and is backed by LTV SaaS Growth Funds.

Location: Remote (Latin America)

Job Overview:

You’ll own quality end-to-end for ThriveCart’s e-commerce platform — test strategy, automation, defect prevention, and production health monitoring. This role is not just about executing test cases; you’ll own quality for your domain, leveraging AI as a core part of the workflow for generating test cases, creating test data, drafting test plans, and accelerating automation. The focus is on judgment: knowing which tests actually matter, understanding risk, and thinking critically about AI-generated output.

This description spans L1–L4 experience levels, with interview depth and expectations scaling accordingly.

What You’ll Own:

Test Strategy & Planning

• Own the quality strategy for your features and domain, including test plans, risk assessment, and coverage decisions
• Flag ambiguities and testability gaps during requirements review to shift-left quality
• Define acceptance criteria in partnership with Product
• Balance manual exploration with automated regression coverage
• Document test plans, coverage decisions, and known risk areas for async visibility across the team

Test Automation

• Write and maintain automated tests (API, integration, end-to-end) using the team’s frameworks
• Keep automation suites fast, reliable, and maintainable — flaky tests are yours to fix
• Maintain CI/CD integration for test execution
• L3+: Design and evolve the overall test automation architecture

Production Quality & Incident Response

• Monitor features in production using observability tools — quality doesn’t end at release
• Respond to dev-escalations and incidents with urgency: assess blast radius, run targeted regression testing, help isolate root cause, and communicate findings clearly
• L3+: Own incident response from the quality side — lead triage, coordinate regression testing, write post-mortems with defect analysis, and drive preventive fixes
• L4+: Coordinate all QA activity during major incidents, communicate to stakeholders, and ensure systemic fixes are validated before release

AI-Augmented QA (Expected, Not Optional)

• Use AI tools daily for generating test cases and data, drafting test plans, analyzing bug patterns, and accelerating automation writing
• AI will generate more test cases than you need — prioritize ruthlessly based on risk
• Review all AI-generated test output critically: AI lacks product context, but you do
• L3+: Teach junior QAs effective AI workflows for testing and establish team AI quality standards
• L4+: Set team standards for AI tool usage — evaluate tools, measure impact on coverage and velocity

Defect Advocacy & Communication

• Write clear, reproducible bug reports that developers can act on immediately
• Advocate for quality: flag risks before release, document known issues, and be explicit about what is and isn’t tested
• L3+: Partner with Product and Engineering on quality metrics and track trends

Collaboration

• Work closely with developers to improve testability at the code level
• Help developers write better unit tests by identifying untested scenarios
• L3+: Mentor L1/L2 QAs on testing mindset, automation skills, and risk thinking

What You Bring To This Role:

Technical Environment

• Testing: API testing (Postman/REST clients), browser automation (Playwright), unit/integration test frameworks
• CI/CD: GitHub Actions (tests run on every PR)
• Observability: AWS CloudWatch, application logs, metrics dashboards
• Platform stack: PHP/TypeScript, Ruby/TypeScript, MariaDB, Redis, AWS
• Playwright is the standard framework for browser automation — strong testing fundamentals are most important

Must-Haves:

• Strong testing fundamentals — test strategy, test case design, risk-based prioritization
• Hands-on automation experience with Playwright
• Comfortable with API testing (Postman/REST clients) and reading application logs
• Already using — or motivated to use — AI tools in a QA workflow
• Clear written communication: bug reports and test plans others can act on without meetings

Nice-to-Haves:

• Experience testing an e-commerce, payments, or subscription platform
• Familiarity with PHP, TypeScript, or Ruby codebases
• AWS/CloudWatch or similar observability tooling
• GitHub Actions or another CI/CD pipeline

Qualifications & Expectations by Level

• L1 (Junior QA) — 0–1 year: Executes test plans, writes simple automation with guidance, and reports bugs clearly. Bootcamp, internship, or early professional QA experience is fine — rigor and curiosity matter more than tenure. Uses AI to learn faster and validate all AI output.
• L2 (QA Engineer 1) — 1–3 years: Independently owns quality for a feature or product area, writes comprehensive test plans and automation, and responds to incidents with targeted testing.
• L3 (Senior QA) — 3–6 years: Leads incident response from the QA side, mentors other QAs, owns quality strategy for complex projects, improves automation architecture, and uses AI to multiply output.
• L4 (Lead QA) — 6+ years: Sets QA standards or practices for a team, serves as the quality authority for a domain, drives major incident response, and partners with leadership on quality metrics and AI tooling strategy.

Success Metrics

• 30 days: First test plan written and approved, first automated tests in CI pipeline, understands the most critical user journeys
• 60 days: Independently owning quality for a feature, automation suite stable, first incident response contribution
• 90 days: Contributing to test strategy discussions, handling dev-escalations independently in your area

On-Call

Shared rotation with engineering (~1 week/month after ramp-up). QA on-call focuses on blast radius assessment and regression testing during incidents.

Career Path

Junior QA → QA Engineer 1 → Senior QA → Lead QA → Head of Quality

Company Culture

Our team thrives on collaboration, innovation, and continuous growth. We foster an open environment with regular knowledge-sharing sessions and encourage active participation in shaping the platform. Our values include:

• Commit to Excellence — delivering high-quality work and continuous improvement
• User-Focused Problem Solving — every design should solve a real user problem
• Team Collaboration — valuing input from every team member
• Growth Mindset — embracing challenges as opportunities to learn and grow

Our team and product are growing rapidly, achieving 64% YoY growth from 2022-2023. We believe in open communication, clear goal setting, and a growth mindset. Our team comes from diverse backgrounds and companies like Shopify, Salesforce, and BigCommerce.