Product Quality Analyst

Playground AI; New York (NY); On-site; USD 60,000 - 75,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity

3 weeks PTO

Health, vision, dental

Education stipend $1200/year

Free lunch daily

MacBook

Autonomy and growth

Job summary

Playground is seeking a QA-focused contributor to ensure the quality, reliability, and usability of software used by thousands of child care businesses, agencies, and government organizations. You’ll catch issues before customers, validate new features, and help engineers ship confidently.

The role sits at the intersection of product, engineering, and customer experience, requiring attention to detail, clear written communication, and ownership to raise the quality bar as Playground grows.

Qualifications

• 1-2 years of experience touching the product development or software delivery lifecycle (QA, product ops, implementation, or similar).
• Clear written communication—describe a bug in an actionable way.

Responsibilities

• Manually test new features with a focus on edge cases, behavior, and regressions.
• Read and interpret product requirements to validate implementation matches intent.
• Surface bugs clearly in Linear with context for engineers to act.
• Work cross-functionally with Engineering and Product.
• Develop deep understanding of the Playground product to spot issues even when it seems to work.

Skills

Attention to detail

Clear written communication

Experience in QA/product lifecycle

Tools

Linear

Jira

Job description

About Playground

Playground is working to make excellent child care accessible to all. Playground has built best in class software to manage all aspects of running a child care business. Playground has raised millions of dollars in funding, has several Statewide contracts, and is working with thousands of schools across the country. Our founders were recently recognized by Forbes as 30 under 30, and our work has been recognized across the country.

Playground is at an inflection point, growing at a quick pace, and we are looking to expand our Product team as quickly as possible. Playground is a team of owners who are not afraid to dive into large, complex projects.

Job Description

As part of Playground’s Product team, you will be responsible for helping ensure the quality, reliability, and usability of the products relied on by thousands of child care businesses, agencies, and government organizations. You’ll play a critical role in catching issues before they reach customers, validating that new features work as intended, and helping our engineering and product teams ship with confidence.

This role sits at the intersection of product, engineering, and customer experience. You’ll test new features, reproduce and document bugs, validate fixes, build and and use your product knowledge to identify edge cases that others may miss. We’re looking for a detail oriented self-starter who takes ownership, communicates clearly, and is excited to help raise the quality bar across the product as we continue to grow.

Responsibilities

• Manually test new features built by engineers, with a focus on edge cases, unexpected user behavior, and regressions in adjacent areas of the product

• Read and interpret product requirements to validate that what's built matches what was intended

• Surface bugs clearly and concisely in our ticketing system (Linear) with enough context for engineers to act fast

• Work cross-functionally with Engineering and Product throughout the development cycle

• Develop a deep understanding of the Playground product to spot when something feels off, even when it's technically "working"

Requirements

• 1-2 years of experience in a role touching the product development or software delivery lifecycle — QA, product ops, implementation, or similar

• Familiarity with how software gets built and shipped — you understand what a ticket is, what a sprint is, and how a feature goes from idea to production

• Experience with a ticketing or project management tool (Linear, Jira, or similar)

• Strong attention to detail and a natural instinct to poke at things until they break

• Clear written communication — you can describe a bug in a way that's actionable, not ambiguous

We'll also consider strong new grads who have internship or project experience in a product or engineering environment and can demonstrate genuine curiosity about how software works.

Nice to Have

• Experience at a startup or fast-moving team

• Exposure to B2B SaaS products

• Familiarity with childcare, education, or government software

Compensation

• The annual salary range for this position is $60,000 – $75,000, subject to standard withholding and applicable taxes.

• Job level and actual compensation will be decided on factors including, but not limited to, individual qualifications objectively assessed during the interview process (including skills and prior relevant experience, potential impact, and scope of role), market demands, and specific work location. The listed range is a guideline, and the range for this role may be modified.

Why Join Playground

• Competitive salary + equity

• 3 weeks of PTO

• Health, vision, and dental benefits

• $1200/year education stipend

• Free lunch daily

• MacBook

• Collaborative and supportive work culture with a high level of autonomy and room for growth

• Help accelerate our mission to make excellent child care accessible to all!