QA Engineer

Who We Are:

Gram Games is the studio behind popular titles like 1010!, Six!, Merge Dragons!, and Merge Magic!, with more exciting projects in the pipeline. We are proudly part of the Zynga & Take-Two Interactive family. We do things differently here: we work in small self-managing teams, giving you an incredible amount of ownership, autonomy, and impact. 

At Gram, everyone is expected to have a razor-sharp focus on creating a tangible impact on their team, their work environment, and on the overall company strategy. If you are motivated by autonomy, constant improvement, collaboration, and a sense of belonging, this is the place for you.

Gram Games is the studio behind some of the most popular titles like 1010!, Six! and Merge Dragons! We also released Merge Magic! and have more awesome projects in the pipeline. We do things differently here: we work in small self-managing teams, enabling you to have an incredible amount of ownership, autonomy and impact. We’ll never ask you to abandon your craft and just focus on managing others or workload. 

At Gram everyone is expected to have a razor-sharp focus on what creates tangible impact: impact on their team, impact on their work environment and impact on the overall company strategy. If you are motivated by autonomy, constant improvement, collaboration and the sense of belonging, this is the job for you.

Job Purpose

As a QA Engineer, you will have good, technical QA and project expertise, and have full ownership of quality across designated game areas. You will be responsible for medium sized feature test strategies, while ensuring timely delivery against production timescales and costs. A QA Engineer divides their time between writing and executing tests directly themselves. 

Reports to: QA Manager

Scope of Responsibility: 

The QA Engineer contributes to a team of around 20 multidisciplinary members, and owns the test strategy for features of moderate complexity. They’ll have experience being embedded within development teams, and a good understanding of how to deploy a range of test techniques to get their work tested. 

Internal Testing: 

Gram is pivoting from a vendor-centric approach to an internal one. As such, through coordinated planning and engagement with the wider Gram QA team, the QA Engineer can organise their work into a steady pipeline for a team of internal peers for execution. They’ll lean on experience or quickly learn how to write tests, optimised for this format. 

Information, Reporting and Communication: 

The QA Engineer communicates gracefully with both their multi-discipline development, and wider Gram QA teams, understanding when and how to engage each. 

You’ll be able to write tests that yield clear results, provide useful data, answer investigative questions and then package the results into an easily digestible format for feature stakeholders. 

Best Practice: 

While not necessarily aware of every cutting edge best practice, the QA Engineer has a sense and instinct for what ‘good’ game QA looks like, and can lean on past experiences to inform their decision making and test writing. 

Work Ethic: 

Being a member of the Gram QA team means you are wholly and genuinely passionate about what you spend your time doing. We rely on individuals to own their personal time management, to constantly seek out work and learning opportunities, as opposed to waiting for them to come to you. If you’re going to do something, do it right! 

Key Responsibilities 

• Own the test strategy for medium complexity features, prioritising test writing and execution equally
• Deploy a variety of different test techniques, demonstrating understanding of test categories including failure, performance etc
• Execute tests against user stories and scripted test cases in a grey box environment 
• Regularly report progress of user story testing throughout the production phase to game team and feature stakeholders
• Log clear feature defects in Jira and steer them through the lifecyle
• Effectively contribute to user story designs, voicing QA concerns and define test scope
• Seek out and nurture relationships with developers to greater understand features and make testing more effective & efficient
• Actively own test areas and ensure defects are entered. This will include taking on features which are technically or practically more challenging leading to higher risk
• Standard bearer for QA, representing discipline in planning, weekly meetings, daily scrums and other team Agile practices
• Solve complex problems in effective, efficient and resourceful ways. Ability to break problems down
• Promote cross-discipline knowledge sharing, e.g. work with code on how to best QA network traffic
• Ensures a positive, professional and collaborative team environment is maintained
• Works with outsource QA team to achieve best possible results, including creating documentation, mentoring where appropriate and fielding questions
• Flexibility in responding to business priorities

Skills & Technical Knowledge

• Good understanding of client/server testing and importance of metadata
• Familiarity with source control, such as GIT, P4 or SVN
• Has worked with development environments such as Xcode, Visual Studio, Android SDK, Unity etc
• Understands how software architecture influences the amount of testing required, including optimizing tests that utilize the same code paths. Ability to pair test features
• Adept at costing, time estimation, risk analysis, and root cause analysis
• Able to execute Telemetry testing
• Familiar with iOS and Android operating systems and hardware
• Understands the SDLC and Change Management
• Aware of the defect metrics the QA team should be tracking to measure success.

Qualifications and Experience

• Strong initiative and ability to pro-actively self-manage; always looking for new and better solutions to existing challenges
• Excellent verbal and written communication and interpersonal skills, backed up with a proactive approach to knowledge sharing and best practice
• Experience with Agile and Kanban methodologies
• Enthusiasm for learning new technical and QA skills
• Passion for gaming and a positive outlook
• Awareness of the mobile games market on iOS and Android
• Expert understanding of software QA and games development practices and terminology (ideally in relation to mobile games or live-supported games)
• Previous experience with bug databases, preferably JIRA
• Experience using a test management system, preferably TestRail or Testmo
• Ideally worked within games as a service products, understands the concept of ‘Live QA’
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or related field
• Typically requires 3-4 years of experience in software quality assurance
• ISTQB Foundation is beneficial

Benefits

In return for bringing your expertise to this top-priority role, we offer some of the best benefits in the gaming industry!

• Highly competitive salary
• Private health insurance
• Hybrid working model
• Company bonus scheme
• Life insurance
• Relocation assistance for those moving to Turkey
• Amazing tech to work with and consoles to play and relax with everywhere you look!

We are proud to be an equal opportunity employer, which means we are committed to creating and celebrating diverse thoughts, cultures, and backgrounds throughout our organization.  Employment with us is based on substantive ability, objective qualifications, and work ethic – not an individual’s race, creed, color, religion, sex or gender, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, national origin or ancestry, alienage or citizenship status, physical or mental disability, pregnancy, age, genetic information, veteran status, marital status, status as a victim of domestic violence or sex offenses, reproductive health decision, or any other characteristics protected by applicable law.

As an equal opportunity employer, we are committed to providing the necessary support and accommodation to qualified individuals with disabilities, health conditions, or impairments (subject to any local qualifying requirements) to ensure their full participation in the job application or interview process. Please contact us at jobs@gram.gs to request any accommodations or for support related to your application for an open position.

Please be aware that Zynga does not conduct job interviews or make job offers over third-party messaging apps such as Telegram, WhatsApp, or others.  Zynga also does not engage in any financial exchanges during the recruitment or onboarding process, and will never ask a candidate for their personal or financial information over an app or other unofficial chat channel.  Any attempt to do so may be the result of a scamp or phishing attack, and you should not engage.  Zynga’s  in-house recruitment team will only contact individuals through their official Company email addresses (i.e., via a zynga.com, naturalmotion.com, smallgiantgames.com, themavens.com, gram.gs email domain).