QA Engineer

QA Engineer — Equity Forge

This is an equity-only position using the Slicing Pie dynamic equity model. There is no cash compensation currently. If that doesn't work for your situation, this role isn't a fit. Read on only if equity-only makes sense for you right now.

About Equity Forge

Equity Forge (equityforge.io) is building infrastructure that transforms how people build skills and wealth: creating pathways from verified volunteering to paid marketplace work to startup equity participation, all on one platform.

We're a spinoff of DemocracyLab (democracylab.org), which has facilitated over 10,000 skilled volunteer placements since 2018. Our core innovation is professional identity built on verified evidence: activity tracking, peer attestation, documented outcomes.

The role

We're looking for a QA engineer to own testing across the platform. The distinctive part: you write the end-to-end spec for a ticket before anyone implements it. Our acceptance criteria are written as desired outcomes rather than mechanisms — you turn them into executable specs that define "done" and fail until the feature exists.

That puts you in the conversation at grooming, not at the end of the sprint.

What you'll do

• Write E2E specs in Playwright ahead of implementation, then keep them meaningful as the feature lands
• Build and own the automated suite at every level — pytest against FastAPI, Vitest against React 19 / TanStack, API contract tests
• Parity-test the migration: our new FastAPI API has to match the legacy Django API's behaviour for the same data. Designing that comparison is yours
• Exploratory and manual testing where automation is the wrong tool — new flows, edge cases, accessibility, anything needing human judgment. We consider knowing the difference part of the craft
• Performance-test search and paginated listings; run an OWASP-style pass before cutover
• Keep GitHub Actions honest — flaky tests fixed or deleted, never retried into silence

What we're looking for

• Genuine TDD/BDD practice — comfortable writing the failing test first, and able to explain to a sceptic why it's faster
• Strong Playwright (or equivalent), writing test code in both Python and TypeScript
• You read a user story and find the gap — the unstated case, the ambiguous criterion — before it becomes a bug
• Async collaboration, PRs reviewed by module owners

Bonus: geospatial/search testing, CI performance work, legacy-to-new migration testing, accessibility standards.