QA Engineering Lead

CommandBar is a platform for helping software companies make their software easier to use (aka a “user assistance platform”).

How many times have you been frustrated by software?

Maybe you didn’t know how to make the software do what you wanted, so you had to wade through pages and pages of support documentation to figure it out. Or suffer through a sassy chatbot. Or worst of all, maybe you were bombarded by a bunch of unhelpful pop-ups prompting you to TAKE A TOUR and CHECK OUT WHATS NEW.

These unhelpful experiences (the help center, the chatbot, the popups) are trying to solve a real problem — we use so many tools today that it’s hard to master every one. But sadly these techniques for helping users are ineffective and annoying.

CommandBar makes any software product simpler, faster, and personalized.

We do this by embedding experiencing in our customers’ product that that actually guide and assist users. Some of these work by capturing the users’ input directly and responding with personalized results (like a custom walkthrough or a clip from a training video). Others work by proactively nudging users (but only when we think they’re likely to find it helpful).

Today, CommandBar serves over 15M end users from forward-thinking SaaS companies like Gusto, Hashicorp, Netlify, Freshworks, and AngelList.

Despite that big number, we're a small team of 25 today that's just beginning to grow, which means tons of opportunities to do trajectory-altering work (for the company’s trajectory and your own). If you're inspired to upgrade how humans use software, come join!

You’re probably really talented. Why should you take your talents to CommandBar? Here are reasons we think working with us is uniquely high impact — on the world and your career.

• Our ratio of impact on the world is high (and we intend to keep it that way).

• There is a lot of room to grow and lead teams (if you’re into that) as we scale. A lot of the roles that we are hiring for are the first in the function so you’ll need to bring 0 to 1 energy.

• We're on the forefront of new technologies, including new developments in AI (which we use heavily to power our product).

• The team we’ve assembled so far is world-class — talented, curious, kind, and obsessed with building delightful, fast, simple software.

The main reasons for joining CommandBar are belief in our product and the opportunities for growth described above. That said, our benefits are pretty sweet 🙂  Overall, we believe in benefits that respect individual choice and reflect the fact that optimizing your life outside of work leads to better performance at work.

The salary range for this role is $105,000 - $135,000

Our benefits include:

• Flexible PTO with a 3 week minimum

• Fully covered medical, dental, and vision insurance for you, and 50% for your dependents

• 12 weeks parental leave for all parents

• 401k with matching

• A learning and development budget

• A generous 'Make Your Life Easier' stipend

• A home office budget

• 3x/year all together including 2 onsites at our office in San Francisco and 1 offsite at a fun 🌴 location!

CommandBar’s products are deployed to millions of users, and our customers rely on our product as a core part of their product, directly exposed to their customers. Our bugs are their bugs. As a result, maintaining an extremely high quality bar isn’t optional — it’s a requirement for our existence and growth.

We’re looking to add a QA engineering lead to help us maintain and expand our QA capabilities.

Today, our QA team consists of a talented group of QA analysts who bring substantial knowledge of our product’s intricacies. We’re looking for someone to lead this team and fully own its outcomes. Ownership of QA at CommandBar means:

• Driving test plans and frameworks to increase coverage and reduce recurring issues.

• Owning implementation of those test plans, with close collaboration with the broader engineering team.

• Monitoring QA results, customer bug reports, and code changes to determine fragile parts of the codebase that need better test coverage.

• Managing and mentoring junior QA analysts in order to help them grow.

• Partner with the engineering team across the feature lifecycle: Identifying risks in new specs, ensuring that new features are testable, collaborating on resolving issues, and making release decisions.

• Empowering the rest of the team (a lot of us use our product a lot!) to participate in the QA process by reporting bugs.

• Where appropriate, directly interfacing with our customers to (a) capture information about a quality issue (to help prevent it in the future) and (b) explain our QA processes (sometimes our customers ask!)

Why should you join us for this role?

• You’re not starting from zero. We have a fantastic QA team, high backend + frontend test coverage, and a world-class engineering team.

• You will have high levels of autonomy. We are a small team that empowers each other to make big decisions and moves quickly once we make them.

• This role is extremely high impact — every issue we resolve and every improvement opportunity you note will directly impact millions of users.

• Our product is new and dynamic, which means you’ll have exposure to novel QA problems. As an embedded product, we need to be thoughtful of ways to test across multiple base environments, and as an AI product, we need to build cutting-edge generative AI testing.

• You will get very deep in our customers’ products, which is cool since we serve some extremely innovative companies (e.g., HCP Terraform, LaunchDarkly, Netlify, AngelList).

• It’s still day zero at CommandBar. There’s a ton of room for you to have an outsized impact on our trajectory and do the best work of your career.

What will help you succeed?

• Experience:

  • Have worked at a startup / small-company before

  • Have built test plans & made test framework decisions from the ground up

  • No previous management experience is needed, but might be helpful.

• Skills:

  • Very strong technical skills: You should feel comfortable reading / writing code. Our stack is Python / Django (backend), Node / Typescript / React (Frontend), and AWS (Infrastructure)

  • Growth mindset: Excitement about process improvement, self-improvement, and helping others grow.

  • Detail-oriented: Enjoy living in the weeds & obsessing over the details

  • Communication: Able to collaborate effectively across different folks. This role will be working heavily with the CTO, the technical support lead, and the broader engineering team.

What we aren’t looking for?

While this role will involve people management, we aren’t looking for someone who wants to spend the majority of their time managing. This role will require a lot of IC work to be successful.

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