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.
