Product QA Engineer (Manual/API/UX) Offline

Data Science UA is a service company with strong data science and AI expertise. Our journey began in 2016 with uniting top AI talents and organizing the first Data Science tech conference in Kyiv. Over the past 9 years, we have diligently fostered one of the largest Data Science & AI communities in Europe.

About the role:
We are looking for a hands-on Product QA Engineer to join a client’s small Ukraine-based engineering team working on a fast-moving web product with real-time AI-driven digital personas.

This role combines manual web and API testing with product-level quality analysis. You will help establish a practical QA process, validate releases and technical flows, evaluate complete user journeys, and turn incomplete product input into questions, draft flows and testable acceptance criteria. This is not an automation QA/SDET, developer, UX designer or product manager position; final product decisions remain with the product owner.

About the client:
Our client is building a web application that delivers real-time AI experiences through AI-driven digital personas. The product is developed by a small, fast-paced engineering team based in Ukraine and working with a US-based founder.

The team is moving toward more frequent, potentially daily releases. A mature QA process and regression baseline are still being established, so this role requires someone who can work autonomously, keep up with a changing product and build useful testing practices from the ground up.

Requirements:
- Hands-on manual QA experience for web products or equivalent practical skills at a strong Junior/Junior+ or Middle level.
- Confident functional testing of REST APIs, including authentication/authorization, requests and responses, payloads, status transitions, negative cases, retries and asynchronous operations.
- Understanding of test/staging/production release cycles, smoke testing and risk-based regression; ability to build and maintain practical checklists without a ready-made test plan.
- Ability to investigate issues across the frontend, backend and third-party integrations and create clear, reproducible bug reports with evidence and user impact.
- Product and UX thinking: ability to assess complete user journeys, identify broken or confusing flows, dead ends and inconsistent states, and distinguish defects from unclear requirements or design preferences.
- Ability to turn incomplete product input into clarifying questions, draft user flows, edge cases and acceptance criteria without inventing business rules.
- Autonomous work in a frequently changing startup environment, with blockers and high-impact findings communicated immediately rather than collected until the end of the day.
- Working written English for documentation and technical materials; basic spoken English is sufficient.
- A predictable schedule with daytime overlap with the Ukraine-based team. We are open to either an experienced part-time QA available for approximately four hours per working day or a high-potential junior/technical student available full-time.

Core Technical Skills:
- API testing: Postman, Swagger/OpenAPI, Bruno, curl or similar tools
- Web debugging: browser DevTools, network requests, console output and basic logs
- Release testing: test/staging/production environments, smoke and regression coverage
- Technical flows: authentication, permissions, integrations, asynchronous operations and error handling
- AI-assisted QA: using tools such as ChatGPT or Claude to prepare and run checks while independently validating and interpreting their output
- Bug tracking: clear, reproducible bug reports (steps, environment, expected vs actual, priority, evidence)

Nice to have:
- Experience testing AI-powered, non-deterministic or real-time audio/video products
- Experience with webhooks, credit-based billing or third-party integrations
- Familiarity with accessibility, responsive design and cross-browser/device testing
- Experience with lightweight test automation or converting repeatable manual checks into automated coverage
- Product/UX sensibility — interest in evaluating user flows and product completeness from a user’s perspective, not only functional correctness
- Experience working with a distributed, US-based client and Ukraine-based engineering team