QA Engineer

Gram Games is the studio behind some of the most popular titles like 1010!, Six! and Merge Dragons! We also released Merge Magic! and have more awesome projects in the pipeline. We do things differently here: we work in small self-managing teams, enabling you to have an incredible amount of ownership, autonomy and impact. We’ll never ask you to abandon your craft and just focus on managing others or workload.

At Gram everyone is expected to have a razor-sharp focus on what creates tangible impact: impact on their team, impact on their work environment and impact on the overall company strategy. If you are motivated by autonomy, constant improvement, collaboration and the sense of belonging, this is the job for you.

Job Purpose

The QA Engineer has in-depth QA, technical and project expertise, and has full ownership of quality across designated game areas. They will manage high priority features while ensuring timely delivery against production timescales and costs. The QA Engineer divides their time between delegation of test plans to testers, and performing testing directly themselves.

Reports to:

Lead QA Manager

Scope of Responsibility:

The QA Engineer contributes to a team of around 20 multidisciplinary members , and owns the test strategy for features of moderate complexity. They’ll have experience being embedded within development teams, and a good understanding of how to deploy a range of test techniques to get their work tested.

Effective Vendor Use:

Through coordinated planning and engagement with the wider Gram QA team, the QA Engineer can organise one or more small but experienced external vendor teams and use them effectively. From bug triage to exploratory testing, you’ll know how and when to deploy different vendors, based on your test ownerships.

Information, Reporting and Communication:

The QA Engineer communicates gracefully with both their multi-discipline development, and wider Gram QA teams, understanding when and how to engage each.

You’ll be able to write tests that yield clear results, provide useful data, answer investigative questions and then package the results into an easily digestible format for feature stakeholders.

Best Practice:

While not necessarily aware of every cutting edge best practice, the QA Engineer has a sense and instinct for what ‘good’ game QA looks like, and can lean on past experiences to inform their decision making and test writing.

Work Ethic:

Being a member of the Gram QA team means you are wholly and genuinely passionate about what you spend your time doing. We rely on individuals to own their personal time management, to constantly seek out work and learning opportunities, as opposed to waiting for them to come to you.If you’re going to do something, do it right!

Main responsibilities and accountabilities

• Execute functional tests in a grey box environment, developing understanding of game code and logic to push quality further up the development cycle.
• Actively own test areas and ensure defects are entered. This will include taking on features which are technically or practically more challenging leading to higher risk.
• Standard bearer for QA, representing discipline in planning, weekly meetings, daily scrums and other team Agile practices.
• Solve complex problems in effective, efficient and resourceful ways. Ability to break problems down.
• Promote cross-discipline knowledge sharing, e.g. work with code on how to best QA network traffic.
• Ensures a positive, professional and collaborative team environment is maintained.
• Works with outsource QA team to achieve best possible results, including creating documentation, mentoring where appropriate and fielding questions.
• Flexibility in responding to business priorities.

Requirements

Skills, Knowledge and Abilities

• Good understanding of client/server testing and importance of metadata.

• Familiarity with source control, such as GIT or SVN.

• Has worked with development environments such as Xcode, Visual Studio, Android SDK, Unity etc.

• Understanding of how software architecture influences the amount of testing required, including optimizing tests that utilize the same code paths. Ability to pair test features.

• Adept at costing, time estimation, risk analysis, and root cause analysis.

• Ability to carry out Telemetry testing.

• Familiarity with iOS and Android operating systems and hardware.

• Understanding of the SDLC and Change Management.

• Aware of the defect metrics the QA team should be tracking to measure success.

Qualifications and Experience

• Enthusiasm for learning new technical and QA skills.
• Passion for gaming and a positive outlook.
• Awareness of the mobile games market on iOS and Android.
• Strong initiative and ability to pro-actively self-manage; always looking for new and better solutions to existing challenges.
• Excellent verbal and written communication and interpersonal skills, backed up with a proactive approach to knowledge sharing and best practise.
• Experienced with agile methodologies.
• Expert understanding of software QA and games development practices and terminology (ideally in relation to mobile games or live-supported games).
• Previous experience with bug databases, preferably JIRA.
• Experience using a test management system, preferably TestRail.
• Ideally worked within games as a service products, understands the concept of ‘Live QA’.

Benefits

In return for bringing your expertise to this top priority role, we can offer some of the best benefits in the Games industry!

• Highly competitive salary
• Free gym membership up to the value of £600 per year
• Private medical care
• Awesome free onsite food serving breakfast, lunch, and lots of treats (naughty and nice)
• Life insurance and a favourable pension scheme
• Healthcare cash plan including dental and optical coverage
• Amazing tech to work with and consoles to play and relax with everywhere you look!