QA Lead

RemoteLead

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.