QA Specialist (Contract)

Hi, we're The Browser Company 👋 and we're building a better way to use the internet.
Browsers are unique in that they are one of the only pieces of software that you share with your parents as well as your kids. Which makes sense, they're our doorway to the most important things — through them we socialize with loved ones, work on our passion projects, and explore our curiosities. But on their own, they don’t actually do a whole lot, they’re kind of just there. They don’t help us organize our messy lives or make it easier to compose our ideas. We believe that the browser could do so much more — it can empower and support the amazing things we do on the internet. That’s why we’re building one: a browser that can help us grow, create, and stay curious.
To accomplish this lofty task, we’re building a diverse team of people from different backgrounds and experiences. This isn’t optional, it’s crucial to our mission, as we need a wide range of perspectives to challenge our assumptions and shape our browser through a bold, creative lens. With that in mind, we especially encourage women, people of color, and others from historically marginalized groups to apply.

As a Quality Assurance Specialist Contractor at The Browser Company, you’ll play a pivotal role in shaping the experience of hundreds of thousands of users across our two browsers, Arc and Dia. You’ll work closely with engineering, product, and external partners to uphold and elevate our standards for quality, stability, and delight.

In this role, you will take full ownership of our Quality Assurance processes—from overseeing manual testing with our QA vendor, to escalating and resolving issues, to designing and maintaining comprehensive test cases for new features. You’ll define our approach to regression testing and act as the final gatekeeper before releases, ensuring every build inspires confidence across product, engineering, and support teams. Your work will be essential to delivering a browser that our community can trust and love.

• Be the primary point of contact for our external QA vendor, enabling a successful partnership through effective communication and detail-oriented program management.

• Organize existing test suites to improve efficiency and observability, and provide comprehensive test coverage.

• Collaborate directly with engineering and product teams to write clear and comprehensive test cases for new features to be tested by our QA vendor, working within fast and changing product development timeframes.

• Triage, investigate, escalate and helpresolve technical issues that arise from regression and one-off testing with consistent accuracy and urgency.

• Writing and executing one-off manual QA tests, especially for MacOS and desktop applications, to catch bugs and ensure features to work as intended prior to release.

• At least 2 years of hands-on, manual QA experience focused on MacOS and desktop applications.

• Experience managing partnerships with external QA vendors.

• Ability to organize, document, and maintain clear test processes and technical documentation, including detailed bug reports and thorough repro steps.

• Proven ability to triage, investigate, escalate, and resolve technical issues, working closely with engineering and support teams.

• Strong communication skills, especially in remote environments (Slack, Linear, or Jira experience preferred). Ability to work closely with engineering and vendor teams.

• You’re pragmatic, motivated by nebulous problems, and excited to work in a startup environment with quick product validation cycles.

• Familiarity with automation testing is a plus.

• Coding knowledge could be helpful for understanding automation or technical documentation, but is not required.

• We’re primarily focused on hiring in North American time zones and require that folks have 4+ hours of overlap time with team members in Eastern Time Zone.

This is a full-time independent contractor (1099) position. The compensation range for this role is $40-$55 per hour, with the actual compensation dependent on experience and interview performance. This is a 6-month contract with the potential for renewal, dependent upon business needs and individual performance.

The Browser Company is a well-funded, ambitious startup of close to 100 people (and growing!) who are passionate about building great products. We are a remote-first, distributed team, with the option to work from office in Brooklyn, New York. We strongly support diversity and encourage people from all backgrounds to apply. 
🚙 To read more about what we value as a company, check out Notes on Roadtrips on our blog.