Staff QA Engineer at Fieldguide – AI-First Quality Role in Columbus
Career & Market Insight
This is a genuinely differentiated engineering role that sits at the intersection of QA engineering, AI/agentic tooling, and enterprise customer success — a rare combination that is increasingly in demand as companies invest in AI-first development workflows.
Compensation context: No salary is listed, but Fieldguide is a well-funded Series B-stage startup (backed by Goldman Sachs, Bessemer, 8VC, Y Combinator). For a Senior or Staff QA/Automation Engineer in San Francisco, market rates typically range from $160K–$230K+ base, plus meaningful equity. The lack of a posted range is a minor yellow flag; clarify this in early screening.
Skills you'll build here:
- Agentic/LLM-driven QA automation — a rapidly growing niche with very few experienced practitioners
- Enterprise SaaS/PaaS environment parity and release confidence engineering
- Cross-functional customer-facing technical leadership
- Regulated domain expertise (SOC 2, FedRAMP, financial audits) — highly transferable to fintech, govtech, and compliance-heavy sectors
Green flags: High ownership scope from day one, clear leveling path from mid to Staff, strong investor backing, and a mission-critical product used by top accounting firms. The "agent-first" QA philosophy positions you on the leading edge of how software quality will be practiced industry-wide.
Watch for: Ambiguity in seniority calibration during hiring could mean compensation anchoring below your expectations. Push for clarity on level and band early. The customer-facing responsibility is heavier than a typical QA role — confirm this fits your preferred balance of internal vs. external work.
About Us
Fieldguide is establishing a new state of trust for global commerce and capital markets by automating and streamlining the work of assurance and audit practitioners — specifically in cybersecurity, privacy, and financial audits. We build software for the people who enable trust between businesses.
We're based in San Francisco, CA, and we're backed by Goldman Sachs Alternatives, Bessemer Venture Partners, 8VC, Floodgate, Y Combinator, and more. Over 50 of the top 100 accounting and consulting firms trust Fieldguide to power mission-critical work.
Role Summary
This role owns quality and automation for large enterprise deployments. You'll work closely with customers and our internal engineering team to develop a world-class QA Function that's built from an agent-first lens.
We're building our quality and automation capacity around agentic tooling, and this role sits at the center of that: using agents to take on the repetitive work of finding, reproducing, and resolving issues, strengthening our internal testing, and keeping our SaaS and PaaS environments consistent. You'll also work directly with the customer on how issues get reported and resolved, and own the reporting that shows where quality is heading.
We're hiring across all levels. Depending on your experience and what you're looking to own, you may join executing against this scope, owning the customer's quality experience end to end, or setting quality and automation standards across Engineering. We'll calibrate seniority during interviews based on scope and demonstrated experience.
What You'll Own
Keep environments consistent across our SaaS and PaaS deployments, so behavior a customer sees in one place matches everywhere else and configuration drift doesn't become a defect
Build our automation capacity for handling bugs using agentic tooling including triage, reproduction, and routing that runs without a human in the middle
Use agentic tools to resolve bugs yourself, shipping fixes rather than filing tickets and waiting
Run bug bashes on new features before they're released, and make the practice repeatable enough that other teams adopt it
Own bug reporting and communication: severity-weighted trends, hotspots, and a clear read on where quality is heading that engineering leadership and the customer both trust
Work closely with the customer to integrate deeply with their processes and improve how they report issues, validate fixes, and decide something is ready for customers
Improve our internal automated testing: coverage where it pays, CI signal people believe, and less flake
Close the loop from a customer-reported issue back to the test or environment check that would have caught it
Support our evaluation efforts by creating and curating relevant datasets that can support agent quality
Who You Are (All Levels)
An engineer who fixes what you find. You're strong in the codebase and you'd rather ship the fix than hand it off
AI-native in how you work: you treat agentic tooling as core leverage for the unglamorous parts of quality, and you've used it on real work rather than just tried it
You think in trends, hotspots, and severity, not anecdotes, and you can tell a clear story from a messy bug backlog
Strong with customers: you can sit with a frustrated enterprise user, understand their process, and be the person they trust to get it resolved
Comfortable across the stack and across environments spanning application code, CI, and the deployment differences that make "works on SaaS" not mean "works everywhere"
Genuinely collaborative across the organization: you'll work daily with engineers, PM, support, and customer-facing teams, and treat that as the best part of the job
High ownership and comfortable with ambiguity. Nobody hands you the list of what to test or what to automate first
Able to internalize a hard domain fast. You don't need to know audit, but you'll learn enough to know what "broken" means to an auditor
Higher-Level Responsibilities
At the Senior level, you may:
Own the customer's quality experience end to end, including the reporting and communication relationship
Set the agentic automation strategy for bug handling and decide where automation pays and where it doesn't
Define what environment parity means across SaaS and PaaS and drive the work to hold it
Collaborate with PMs and engineering leads to shape release practice and quality gates
Mentor other engineers and raise the bar on testing rigor across teams
At the Staff level, you may:
Set and champion quality and automation standards across Engineering, beyond this one deployment
Drive company-level initiatives on release confidence, environment consistency, and defect prevention
Partner with engineering and product leadership to define long-term quality strategy
Serve as a trusted advisor to leaders across Engineering, Product, and Support
Represent Fieldguide externally through writing, speaking, and open-source contributions
Experience
Must-have:
Strong production software engineering experience — you write and ship code, not only tests
Hands-on experience building test automation and CI quality gates that engineers actually rely on
Real use of AI or agentic tooling as part of how you work
Experience working directly with customers or enterprise users on issues they care about
Comfort operating in ambiguity and owning outcomes without a defined queue
Nice-to-have:
Python, TypeScript, React, Postgres, Hasura, GraphQL
E2E and integration frameworks such as Playwright or Cypress
Experience with both multi-tenant SaaS and single-tenant or self-managed enterprise deployments
Infrastructure exposure for environment parity work — AWS, Kubernetes, Terraform
Observability and tracing tooling such as Datadog
Experience building agentic workflows or internal tooling with LLMs
Performance and load testing, especially on long-running workflows
Security and compliance environments (SOC 2, FedRAMP, or similar)
Background in audit, accounting, financial services, or another regulated domain
Benefits
Competitive compensation with equity
Comprehensive health and wellness benefits
Flexible time off and work schedules
Technology reimbursements
401(k) plan
Twice-yearly in-person offsites across the U.S.
Wellness benefits starting on your first day
Our Values
Fearless — Inspire and break down seemingly impossible walls
Fast — Launch fast with excellence; iterate to perfection
Lovable — Deliver happiness and 11-star experiences
Owners — Execute and run the business with ownership
Win-win — Create mutual value and earn trust for life
Inclusive — Scale the best ideas with inclusive teams
Frequently Asked Questions
Is this QA Engineer role fully remote?
What experience levels is Fieldguide hiring for this QA role?
Do I need prior audit or accounting knowledge to apply?
What agentic or AI tools are expected for this role?
What is the compensation range for this position?
