QA Manager

Location: Remote US

Annual salary: $150,000 - $185,000 USD (Final base salary within this range will be determined based on job-related factors, including the candidate’s experience, skills, qualifications, and geographic location)

Type: Full Time

Reports to: Director of QA

The role

We’re looking for a QA Manager to own end-to-end quality across hardware, firmware, PlayOS, and game experiences for Nex Playground. This is a role for someone who enjoys hands-on testing and debugging while also shaping test strategy, release criteria, and the overall quality bar.

Your mission is to ensure every hardware revision works seamlessly with PlayOS and our games—delivering a stable, responsive, compatible, and delightful experience in real-world conditions. You’ll partner closely with the engineering team and game cells to identify risk, prevent regressions, and support confident release decisions.

Key responsibilities

Hardware compatibility & system validation

• Own validation for hardware bring-up and ongoing compatibility across hardware revisions, PlayOS versions, and game builds.
• Develop and maintain risk-based test plans across EVT, DVT, and PVT—or equivalent development stages—including:
  • boot, update, rollback, and recovery flows
  • input, tracking, peripherals, and connectivity
  • long-session stability, power cycles, and intermittent failures
  • storage integrity and save-data behavior
• Maintain a clear compatibility matrix covering hardware revisions, PlayOS versions, firmware versions, and game builds.
• Partner with engineering teams to isolate hardware–software issues and verify fixes.

Firmware quality & release gating

• Own the test strategy for firmware and PlayOS updates, including upgrade and downgrade paths, interrupted updates, failure scenarios, sleep/wake behavior, backgrounding, resume, and recovery.
• Define manual validation and integrate automated checks into OTA release workflows where appropriate, covering installation, staged rollout, rollback, interruption handling, and recovery.
• Establish quality gates, entry and exit criteria, and evidence-based go/no-go recommendations for hardware and firmware releases.
• Assess release risk, track critical issues, and ensure regressions are understood before rollout.

Performance, reliability & real-world readiness

• Validate system compatibility across PlayOS and game releases, including input, tracking, performance, save data, and update-related regressions.
• Define and validate measurable quality targets such as frame-rate stability, responsiveness, latency, memory usage, thermal behavior, and crash-free sessions.
• Execute long-run, stress, and recovery testing to identify memory leaks, degradation over time, and intermittent failures.
• Test representative user environments, including network variability, display configurations, device states, user flows, and edge conditions.

Automation & tooling

• Build and maintain reliable automated regression coverage across device, firmware, OTA, system-integration, and game-compatibility workflows where appropriate.
• Integrate high-value automated checks into release workflows and make failures easy to diagnose.
• Develop lightweight tools and scripts that accelerate setup, validation, data collection, and troubleshooting.

Communication, vendor management & cross-functional leadership

• Produce actionable bug reports with clear reproduction steps, environment and build details, logs, impact, and supporting evidence.
• Drive defect triage and prioritization with engineering and product partners, particularly during release cycles.
• Manage external vendors, including scope, capacity, priorities, deliverables, acceptance criteria, quality standards, and performance.
• Communicate quality status and release risk clearly, helping teams make informed tradeoffs and decisions.
• Champion consistent testing practices and raise the quality bar across teams through influence and collaboration.

Key Requirements

• Strong hands-on QA experience in system-level testing, firmware or OS validation, or hardware–software integration.
• Demonstrated ability to design risk-based test strategies and execute thorough exploratory testing.
• Experience validating firmware or OTA update flows, including failure handling, rollback, and recovery.
• Experience investigating performance, reliability, and intermittent issues using logs, traces, crash data, and other diagnostic evidence.
• Ability to create maintainable automated tests, tools, or scripts in at least one programming or scripting language.
• Experience coordinating external QA partners or vendors and holding deliverables to clear quality standards.
• Clear written and verbal communication, sound judgment, and strong cross-functional collaboration.

Nice-to-have

• Experience with consumer electronics, hardware bring-up, EVT/DVT/PVT, or manufacturing test concepts.
• Experience with game or platform QA, graphics and performance profiling, input or motion-tracking systems, or observability tooling.
• Familiarity with Android or Linux debugging, ADB, CI/CD systems, device logs, traces, and crash dumps.
• Experience building test infrastructure, managing device labs, or validating staged software rollouts at scale.