QA Lead

Sakura Games is an international game development outsourcing company founded in Cyprus. Since 2018, we have built full-cycle mobile games for the global market — casual and midcore titles for international clients — and we also support live games, build prototypes, and handle porting projects.

We currently run more than 10 projects in parallel, each with a dedicated cross-functional Scrum team. QA is delivered through external vendors, and we are now building an internal QA function to own quality across the company.

We are looking for a QA Lead to take ownership of this function. You will manage around 8 QA specialists working across several external vendors, drive the efficiency and quality of their work, build unified QA processes, and help project teams make better quality-related decisions.

This is primarily a leadership and process ownership role, but we expect the QA Lead to stay close to the product: review test documentation, support bug triage, assess test coverage, challenge testing approaches, and occasionally perform hands-on testing when deeper context or expert validation is needed.

Responsibilities

QA processes & strategy

• Build and continuously improve QA processes for mobile game projects across the company.
• Define unified standards for testing, test documentation, bug reporting, and release checks.
• Plan QA activities across project stages: prototypes, active development, releases, live support, and porting.
• Define where testing coverage is sufficient and where additional checks are needed.
• Introduce QA metrics and quality reporting, and use them to drive decisions.
• Recommend tools, approaches, and practices that improve testing efficiency and quality.

Vendor & team management

• Manage the work of around 8 QA specialists delivered through several external vendors.
• Set clear expectations, KPIs, and SLAs for vendors.
• Monitor task delivery, timelines, reports, bug reports quality, test coverage, and overall testing quality.
• Review test documentation created by external QA teams and provide actionable feedback.
• Evaluate vendor performance and coordinate QA capacity across multiple projects.
• Optimize testing processes and QA-related costs across the project portfolio.

Quality ownership & expert support

• Support teams in choosing the right testing approach for features, releases, prototypes, and live updates.
• Review test plans, checklists, regression suites, and release checklists.
• Participate in bug triage and help teams prioritize defects based on severity, impact, and project risks.
• Assess QA risks and evaluate build readiness for release.
• Help identify gaps in testing coverage and suggest practical improvements.
• Stay close to project quality without becoming the primary hands-on tester on every project.

Hands-on involvement

• Perform hands-on testing when expert validation, deeper product context, or urgent release support is needed.
• Test game features, builds, releases, and prototypes selectively, with focus on high-risk areas.
• Support functional, regression, smoke, sanity, exploratory, and compatibility testing through planning, review, and targeted execution.
• Validate game mechanics, UI/UX, progression, economy, monetization, ad integrations, analytics, and technical stability when needed.

Release & collaboration

• Participate in release planning and help teams make informed go / no-go decisions.
• Collaborate closely with producers, developers, game designers, analysts, and external QA teams.
• Communicate quality status, risks, blockers, and improvement areas clearly to stakeholders.
• Promote a practical quality mindset across project teams.

Requirements

• 5+ years of experience in QA within the mobile game development industry.
• 2+ years of experience as a QA Lead / QA Manager.
• Experience testing mobile games, including stores, SDKs, payments, IAP, ads, and analytics.
• Experience in test planning across different systems, devices, OS versions, network conditions, and performance constraints.
• Strong understanding of the full game development cycle: from prototype to release and live support.
• Experience building or improving QA processes.
• Strong expertise in manual testing and the ability to guide others on testing depth, coverage, and approach.
• Experience reviewing test documentation and improving test design.
• Experience working on multiple projects in parallel.
• Solid understanding of Scrum / Agile processes.
• Experience with Jira or similar task trackers.
• Experience with test management tools such as TestRail, Xray, or similar.
• Ability to create clear and useful test documentation: checklists, test plans, regression suites, and release checklists.
• Structured mindset, ownership, responsibility, and strong communication skills.
• English at B2 level or higher for working with international vendors and clients.

Nice to Have

• Experience working in a game development outsourcing company.
• Proven experience managing external QA teams or vendors: coordinating their work, quality, and timelines.
• Ability to evaluate vendor performance and control testing-related costs at scale.
• Experience with Unity-based projects.
• Experience with soft launch and preparing games for release on the App Store / Google Play.
• A pragmatic view on automation and tooling in game QA — understanding where it pays off, such as build smoke tests, backend checks, economy / IAP / analytics validation, device-farm compatibility runs, or Unity test tooling, and where manual testing remains the better choice.
• Interest in exploring AI-assisted testing is a plus, as we are open to investing in this area.

Conditions

• Part-time remote work.
• Salary in US dollars.
• Zero bureaucracy, minimal micromanagement and streamlined approvals.
• Small friendly agile teams.
• English lessons in groups of 3-4 participants.