Manager, Quality Assurance

At Kabam, we’re constantly raising the bar of excellence in free-to-play gaming. We hire for passion and diversity so that we can triumph in our collective skill. Our teams are made up of a fusion of personalities and interests bound together by a collaborative nature, fun-loving culture, and a drive to do what it takes to make great games. And this is where you come in…

The key function of the Manager, Quality Assurance is to serve as a strategic QA leader across multiple QA teams within the department. They collaborate with Senior QA leadership, development, and production to actively champion change and drive QA transformation to meet departmental goals and objectives. The Manager, Quality Assurance leverages data-driven insights to make informed decisions, challenging current processes and improving them. They play a leadership role within the team by developing QA leaders and fostering a knowledge-sharing and continuous innovation environment.

This role is a full-time, on-site position based 5 days a week at our Downtown Vancouver studio.

In this role, you can expect to:

Key Accountabilities

Team Management and Direction:

• Oversee multiple QA teams within the department, providing clear direction, priorities, and strategic guidance to QA leads and analysts in each group.
• Lead and coach QA Leads to manage their day-to-day teams with autonomy, fostering a high-performance culture grounded in a growth mindset.
• Proactively evaluate and analyze team structures, skill sets, and operational gaps, restructuring coverage and roles to support evolving studio needs.

Coordination with Senior QA & Development Leadership:

• Coordinate with the Senior QA leadership group to drive and improve the Certification and QA Engineering teams, ensuring alignment with department goals and studio objectives.
• Act as an embedded strategic partner to Development, Production, and Studio Leadership, moving QA from reactive execution to an upstream quality partnership.
• Serve as a change management champion across the department, challenging current processes, modernizing QA workflows, and adopting new tools and methodologies.

Task Coordination and Prioritization:

• Collaborate with Production, Engineering, and Project QA Leads to determine task priorities for submitting builds to First Party partners.
• Drive the creation, alignment, and execution of a Test Plan/Schedule for the multiple QA teams, ensuring effective coordination and updates for each project.

Certification and Automation Testing:

• Take ownership of the Certification verification strategy of deliverables, ensuring compliance with industry standards and requirements.
• Oversee and own Automation testing and validation of deliverables, ensuring effective test coverage and accuracy of results.

Resource Allocation and Budget Management:

• Assess and forecast staffing to ensure each project receives the appropriate level of staffing and testing coverage from internal QA.
• Build, forecast, and manage departmental and project QA operational budgets in collaboration with Production, Senior Leadership, and Finance.
• Oversee and assess external vendor strategy, balancing cost with meeting targets.

Communication, Reporting, and Data-Driven Decision Making:

• Communicate project status, progress, and high level trends regularly to senior leadership.
• Architect and monitor key quality metrics to translate complex technical risks into actionable, data-backed business insights.

Risk Management:

• Proactively identify and manage organizational and delivery risks related to, identifying potential issues and implementing mitigation strategies.
• Partner directly with other production leads to identify and address recurring issues, driving structural solutions.

Career Development and Department Growth:

• Drive the career development and progression of individual QA Analysts, providing guidance, feedback, and opportunities for growth.
• Conduct regular performance and gap analyses across the team to provide targeted coaching and actionable feedback.

Quality Advocacy:

• Promote a "quality first" approach to decision-making, emphasizing the importance of performance and player experience.
• Champion continuous improvement, innovation, and high quality standards.

KPI Management:

• Drive the assigned project to hit Key Performance Indicator (KPI) targets across teams, such as defect closure rate, test coverage, or release stability by holding teams accountable for quality benchmarks.
• Continuously monitor and analyze relevant metrics to ensure project success and drive continuous improvement.

Coaching and Mentoring Team members:

• Direct, develop, and mentor QA Leaders on best practices.
• Create an open, knowledge-sharing environment where continuous learning and peer mentorship is encouraged.

To be successful in this role, your background includes:

• High school diploma.
• 8+ years of related game testing experience in a similar capacity, preferably for mobile games.
• 4+ years in a QA leadership capacity.
• Technical Abilities: Advanced understanding of Game Design.
• Familiarity with both Android and Apple devices.
• Strong aptitude to learn quickly and effectively.

Our success is due to the hard work of our people. We share our success with our people through flexible benefits and reward programs, sweet swag, snacks, and more. Here’s a look at some of the support we provide our people:

• Extended Health Coverage: effective day one, no waiting period! Our benefits cover health, dental, life, disability, and extended paramedical services such as vision care, mental health practitioners, massage, physiotherapy, acupuncture, and much more.
• DEIB Benefits: DEIB is important to us and to our people - that’s why our benefits include gender-affirming care, fertility care, and other hormonal treatments and drugs.
• Flexible Spending Accounts: our benefits are built on a flex credit model, so you’re able to choose the coverage levels that are right for you, and allocate the rest to a group RRSP/TFSA, Health Spending account, and/or Personal Spending Account.
• RRSP Matching: everyone retires eventually, and we help our people save for their futures with a contribution matching program once you reach 90 days with us.
• Commuter Benefit: we believe in the power of in-person collaboration, and want to support you in making it work for you! We provide a flexible, monthly cash allowance to help cover the costs of transit, parking, or even personal logistics like childcare and pet care.
• PTO and Parental Leave: we offer paid parental leave, flexible paid time off, paid time off for volunteering, sick leave, and holiday closures.
• Employee and Family Assistance Program: this program provides crisis management support, immediate mental health care, and generalized support for emotional, mental, and financial well-being.
• Telus Virtual Health: we provide increased access to remote healthcare providers for prescription refills or referrals from the comfort of your home.
• Learning and growth: We encourage people to grow both personally and professionally, and support this through regular lunch & learns and an education stipend.
• Pay transparency: We share with employees the pay range their role falls within and clear career maps to determine how they can grow within their role or level-up to a promotion.
• Cool spaces: Our offices are in Vancouver, Montreal, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. Whether it’s summers on the rooftop patio in Downtown Vancouver, or watching the fireworks in Montreal’s South Shore - we want our people to feel like their time spent in office is worthwhile!
• Giving back: Kabammers have a dedicated paid day off every year to volunteer to a cause close to their hearts. Some teams even band together for group volunteer days off-site!