Technical Test Analyst - Core Systems - Lightforge Games

Lightforge Games is a new studio bringing the roleplaying back into RPGs.

We're looking for people of all levels, backgrounds, voices, identities, and perspectives to join us on our journey. We strongly believe the key to making a better game, better company, and better industry begins with a diverse set of voices.

We value transparency, empathy, and personal growth, and we believe that making games is both an art and a science.

As a fully remote company, we're open to teammates living nearly anywhere. We practice nonlinear workdays, allowing everyone to determine how and when they work best. We also follow an open salary policy where all pay details are shared with everyone. This holds us accountable to fair pay.

Lightforge Games is very much a work-in-progress, and you can help shape who we are. Come join us to build something special!

Learn more about us here.

Please note - While our corporate address is in Raleigh, all positions at Lightforge Games are remote

We're looking for a Technical Test Analyst to support early feature development and lay the foundations for our test strategy for active production and live operations. This role will generally focus on our core online, social, and client experience systems. It requires technical aptitude along with the flexibility to cycle between software and game testing domains and their intersection.

You will work closely with the development team, providing test insights and qualitative analysis to help guide development effort. This role will encourage you to stretch the test domain beyond functional testing. We’re looking for a methodical, imaginative tester who feels most at home applying a creative, scientific approach to both functional and qualitative testing. You should have a solid understanding of client-service interactions, general networking performance concepts, and the ability to think from the perspectives of player, client, and backend to break down the end-to-end relationships.

You’ll play a critical role in shaping our confidence around risk and readiness, empowering the broader team to make conscious, informed choices and tradeoffs. By joining us at this early stage, you’ll be instrumental in defining how we execute an embedded, highly integrated test strategy in a remote, distributed, asynchronous team environment.

Responsibilities

• Test features along the full development cycle from concept and prototype through live delivery, focusing on improving the early development state through issue prevention, early detection, risk analysis, and qualitative analysis
• Approach feature testing with whole systems thinking — unpacking the elements of how clients interact with each other, how they interact with backend services, how services interact with each other, how that rolls up into a singular product system, how multiple systems interact with each other, etc.
• Write, maintain, and execute test passes, leveraging risk-based judgement to choose appropriate test methods, test focus, and tradeoffs
• Discover and share insights from analyzing test-related data, including bugs, test coverage, crash stacks, and game telemetry
• Develop processes, workflows, docs, and technical resources to improve test efficiency and effectiveness
• Balance deep, creative, exploratory, gray box testing with structured black/white box testing to balance effort, risk, coverage, and tradeoffs
• Facilitate critical issue and test strategy retrospectives to drive a culture of continuous improvement, helping amplify our Work-in-progress Core Values
• Embrace and uphold our Core Values
• Contribute your story to Lightforge's direction
• Listen to and empower the stories of others

Requirements

• Experience developing or improving test tactics, workflows, and resources
• General familiarity working with JSON data structures
• Functional awareness of cloud technologies and how infrastructure, backend services, and end-user applications form a product ecosystem
• Experience evaluating technical test outputs — logs, callstacks, telemetry, etc.
• Strong communication skills and ability to break complex, technical topics into smaller, simpler pieces
• Strong insights reporting skills — documentation, presentations, data visualizations, etc.

Pluses

• Experience working on live games and/or RPGs
• Experience with network traffic monitoring/manipulation tools (Fiddler, Charles, Clumsy, etc.)
• Experience testing social, matchmaking, notification, monetization, or character customization systems
• Experience testing client-service call patterns, analytics, or operational tools
• Proficiency with one or more game engine toolsets.
• Scripting experience (automation tests, workflow utilities, etc.)

The base salary range for this role is between $75,000 - $150,000, depending on levels of skills and experience. The base salary range represents the low and high end of LFG’s salary range for this position. Salaries will vary depending on various factors which include, but are not limited to location, education, skills, experience and performance. Breakdown is as follows:

• Junior Level: $75,000-$90,000
• Mid-Level: $105,000-$120,000
• Senior-Level: $135,000-$150,000