QA Engineer (Backend Services + Gameplay) Gaming Industry Experience

Title- Backend Services & Gameplay QA Engineer

Location- Los Angeles ,CA (Hybrid)

Contract- 12+ months Contract

About the Role

We re looking for a Backend Services & Gameplay QA Engineer

This is a hybrid role that demands both system-level QA rigor and deep player knowledge to safeguard and shape the experiences of the next generation of League players.

Responsibilities
Backend Services QA

• Guide an external test team by helping ensure the proper Test Suites have been made and executed on.

• Own quality for new player backend services: onboarding, tutorials, progression, entitlements, and rewards.
• Design and implement API and service-level test plans.
• Validate end-to-end journeys (e.g., account creation tutorial completion reward unlock client display).
• Identify opportunities to utilize automation for regression, contract, and negative testing and implement those tests
• Debug complex service issues through logs, telemetry, and monitoring tools.
• Prepare for the release of these features by helping decide on and executing on strategies that mitigate any potential issues such as canary deployments, A/B testing, and load testing.

• Provide clear reporting that highlights risks and player-impacting issues.

Gameplay QA

• Use League expertise to provide high-skill player feedback on features like WASD movement and machine learning bots and other unannounced experimental features
• Ensure gameplay changes feel authentic, competitive, and consistent with the League experience.
• Test that gameplay changes functionally match their design intent
• Help guide an external test team made entirely of Masters players to perform these same evaluations effectively. This includese reviewing their Test Suites to ensure they've conducted proper testing

Required Qualifications

• 3+ years in Gameplay QA, SDET, or backend-focused testing roles.
• Strong knowledge of service-oriented architectures, microservices, and APIs.
• Skilled with API validation tools (Postman, Insomnia)
• Experienced with debugging distributed service issues (logs, traces, metrics).
• Gold rank or higher in League of Legends, with an understanding of competitive gameplay and onboarding friction points.
• Passion for working on League of Legends

Desired Qualifications

• Diamond Rank or higher in League of Legends is highly valued
• Past work on a Moba game or any other live service competitive PVP game
• Experience testing onboarding/new player experiences or live service systems.
• Familiarity with load testing, contract testing, and canary releases.
• Hands-on with observability tools (Grafana, Kibana, Datadog).
• Prior work with AI/ML-driven features in QA contexts.
• Skilled with automation frameworks (PyTest, JUnit, etc.).