Senior QA Engineer, Forward Deployed

Ellipsis Health, Inc.; San Francisco (CA); Hybrid; USD 120,000 - 140,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

401(k) matching

Health insurance

Vision insurance

Dental insurance

Flexible paid time off

Job summary

Ellipsis Health, Inc. is seeking a Forward Deployed QA Engineer based in San Francisco with the opportunity for remote work within the United States. The role focuses on ensuring the quality and stability of our conversational AI product while collaborating closely with engineering teams to troubleshoot and optimize workflows.

The ideal candidate will have a strong background in QA Engineering, expertise with LLM behaviors, and excellent communication skills for managing client stakeholders.

Qualifications

• Strong background in software quality assurance and end-to-end test strategies.
• Hands-on experience with LLM behaviors and call-tracing tools.
• Ability to write SQL queries and navigate cloud infrastructure logs.
• Fundamental understanding of Speech-to-Speech workflows.
• Basic familiarity with enterprise telephony routing.

Responsibilities

• Analyze client workflows to design comprehensive test cases.
• Build and execute automated test scenarios.
• Evaluate prompts used in the testing framework.
• Deploy various testing methodologies at the right timing.
• Collaborate with engineering teams to identify technical roadblocks.
• Perform daily root cause analysis on LLM failures.
• Investigate live customer calls and production incidents.
• Monitor the end-to-end voice AI pipeline.

Skills

QA Engineering

LLM Troubleshooting

SQL (PostgreSQL)

Speech-to-Speech Pipeline Knowledge

Telephony Routing Familiarity

Client Management

Job description

If you’ve responded to an advertisement or been contacted by someone claiming to be from Ellipsis Health, you should be very careful and confirm that you are communicating with us by contacting us directly at [e-mail] . There have been several fraudulent job postings made by scammers pretending to be Ellipsis Health that are in fact totally unrelated to our company.

Employment Type

Full time

Location Type

Hybrid

Compensation

• $120K – $140K

About the Team

We maintain daily, high-touch interactions with customers to communicate workflow progress, manage User Acceptance Testing (UAT) deadlines, integrate client feedback, and ensure that deployments are executed rapidly while maintaining rigorous quality standards.

Ellipsis Health is located in the San Francisco Bay Area, but we are open to remote candidates within the United States.

About the Role

As a Forward Deployed QA Engineer, you will occupy a critical, high-impact role dedicated to ensuring the reliability, stability, and quality of our core conversational AI product, Sage, across diverse client workflows.

This role bridges the gap between Quality Assurance, AI Engineering, and Production Operations. You will focus heavily on automated testing, prompt engineering validation, and rapid root cause analysis (RCA) of Large Language Model (LLM)-driven behaviors in fast-paced, real-world deployments.

Responsibilities:

Workflow Mapping & Test Case Generation: Deeply analyze assigned client workflows to design robust, comprehensive positive and negative test cases that safeguard system stability.

AI-Driven Test Automation: Build and execute automated test scenarios by configuring shadow agents.

Prompt Evaluation & Optimization: Apply a strong understanding of prompt awareness to draft, refine, and evaluate prompts used within the testing framework to accurately simulate user behaviors and edge cases.

End-to-End Testing Execution: Strategically deploy specific testing methodologies including Sanity, Smoke, Regression, and Functional testing - determining the exact environment (staging, pre-production, production) and timing for each execution.

Deployment Cadence & Cross-Functional Collaboration: Partner closely with engineering teams during release cycles to proactively identify, triage, and unblock technical roadblocks, ensuring the product is continuously deployment-ready.

Daily LLM Defect RCA: Perform rigorous, daily root cause analysis on LLM-specific failures inherent to generative AI, including hallucinations, high latency, and logic deviations.

Live Production Call Debugging: Investigate live customer calls and production incidents in real time to unblock critical production use cases.

Audio & Transcription Validation: Query and analyze historical call transcripts, system behaviors, and audio data pipelines to pinpoint where a conversational workflow broke down.

Speech-to-Speech (S2S) Pipeline Monitoring: Monitor and evaluate the end-to-end voice AI pipeline. This involves analyzing Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) accuracy, managing audio-to-text latency issues, and understanding general Speech-to-Speech mechanics alongside the stability of the core Knowledge Base feeding the AI.

Advanced Evaluation Frameworks: Maintain a strong conceptual understanding of advanced LLM evaluation paradigms and tools such as LLM-as-a-judge - to remain aware of how AI response quality and accuracy are programmatically graded at scale.

Telephony & Call Flow Awareness: Possess a foundational understanding of real-world call management and telephony routing concepts, including how the system is expected to navigate warm transfers, blind transfers, and voicemail detection workflows.

Qualifications:

Experience in QA Engineering: Strong background in software quality assurance, with a proven track record of designing, executing, and managing end-to-end test strategies (Smoke, Sanity, Regression, Functional).

LLM & Generative AI Expertise: Hands-on experience or deep technical familiarity with troubleshooting LLM behaviors, diagnosing hallucinations, managing latency, and using LLM call-tracing tools.

Technical & Logging Proficiency: Ability to comfortably write SQL queries (specifically PostgreSQL) to pull data logs and navigate cloud infrastructure logs (such as GCP) to perform rapid root-cause analysis.

Voice & Conversational AI Domain Knowledge: Foundational understanding of Speech-to-Speech pipelines, including Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), audio-to-text workflows, and core knowledge base integrations.

Telephony Foundations: Basic familiarity with enterprise telephony routing, call management mechanics (warm/blind transfers), and voicemail detection systems.

Client-Facing Capability: Strong communication skills and the professional agility required to manage UAT timelines, coordinate with client stakeholders, and support rapid production deployments.

Salary and Benefits

We offer competitive salary and benefits, including 401(k) matching, health, vision, and dental insurance, and very flexible paid time off.

The typical salary range for this role is $120,000 to $140,000 USD, depending on skills, qualifications, and relevant experience.

As a health technology company, we reserve the right to run background checks on candidates to whom we extend offers, in compliance with applicable laws. We evaluate candidates holistically and comply with all “ban the box” regulations.

Assistance

If you have a disability or require accommodations during the application or recruitment process, please contact [e-mail].