QA Analyst
Location: Full Remote (EU/Italy preferred)
Core collaboration hours: 09:00–18:00 CET/CEST (Italian time)
Project: You’ll help drive delivery on Bradley the Badger, our upcoming action‑adventure title.
About the Studio
We’re an independent game studio building Bradley the Badger, a systems‑driven action‑adventure game. Our cross‑disciplinary team (design, art, animation, programming, audio) works in tight, iterative loops, combining rapid prototyping with milestone‑driven planning. We value ownership, clarity, and respectful candor: raise risks early, propose solutions, learn fast, and celebrate wins together.
Job Description
As a QA Analyst embedded within the development team, you will help ensure that Bradley the Badger delivers a polished, stable, and enjoyable player experience. You will work closely with designers, programmers, artists, producers, and directors throughout development, providing fast, clear, and actionable feedback that supports iteration and decision-making.
This role is not limited to final-stage testing: you will be involved throughout the production process, testing new features, validating gameplay systems, identifying risks early, and helping the team maintain quality across builds and milestones. Your work will support a systems-driven action-adventure experience by ensuring mechanics, content, progression, performance, and player-facing features function as intended.
Key Responsibilities
- Test gameplay systems, levels, features, UI, progression, and content throughout development, from early implementation to milestone delivery.
- Identify, reproduce, document, and track bugs with clear steps, expected results, actual results, severity, priority, screenshots, and video evidence when useful.
- Work embedded with the development team to provide timely feedback on new features, design changes, and build stability.
- Perform regular smoke tests on new builds to quickly verify core functionality, build stability, and readiness for deeper testing or team review.
- Collaborate closely with designers, programmers, artists, and production teams to validate fixes and verify that implemented features meet design and quality expectations.
- Perform functional, regression, exploratory, usability, compatibility, and performance-focused testing as needed.
- Help maintain and improve QA processes, test plans, checklists, documentation, and reporting workflows.
- Support milestone preparation by identifying release risks, prioritizing critical issues, and communicating quality status clearly to the team.
- Participate in playtests and provide structured feedback on gameplay feel, readability, progression, difficulty, and overall user experience.
- Monitor recurring issues and help identify patterns that may indicate deeper design, technical, or pipeline problems.
- Work with directors and production teams to estimate, prioritize, and deliver QA tasks on schedule.
Qualifications
- Proven experience as a QA Analyst, Game Tester, Embedded QA, or similar role in the video game industry.
- Strong understanding of game development pipelines and experience working closely with multidisciplinary development teams.
- Excellent ability to identify, reproduce, isolate, and clearly document bugs and gameplay issues.
- Experience using bug tracking and production tools such as Jira (preferred), Trello, ClickUp, Asana, or similar.
- Strong analytical skills and attention to detail, with the ability to distinguish between technical bugs, design issues, usability concerns, and polish opportunities.
- Experience testing gameplay systems, levels, UI, progression, save/load flows, performance, and build stability.
- Ability to provide constructive, actionable feedback while respecting design intent and production priorities.
- Familiarity with Unreal Engine is strongly preferred.
- Basic understanding of console/PC development constraints, optimization concerns, and certification-style testing is a plus.
- Ability to work independently and proactively in a fully remote environment.
- Fluency in English is required; proficiency in Italian is preferred.
What we offer
- A fully remote work environment that promotes flexibility and work-life balance.
- Opportunities for professional growth and development within the company.
- A collaborative and inclusive team culture that values creativity and innovation.
Job Types: Full-time, Temporary, Contract
Contract length: 12 months
Work Location: Remote
