Staff QA Engineer, Riot Client - Publishing Platform

Riot Client is the gateway to play for all of Riot's desktop experiences. Utilized by over 100 Million players across the globe to discover, install and play titles like League of Legends, VALORANT, Teamfight Tactics and more. We aspire to have Riot Client hyper serve players, providing them with the information they need to decide what they want to play, how they want to play it and with whom.

As a Staff Quality Engineer on the Riot Client team, you will own the quality of desktop software that millions of players worldwide use to authenticate, install, patch, discover and launch Riot's games. Your work will be players' first touchpoint with the wide range of experiences that Riot has to offer - including League of Legends, VALORANT, Wild Rift, Teamfight Tactics, Legends of Runeterra, and beyond. You will allow players to discover new games from the Riot ecosystem, unlock content, and promote overall deeper engagement. You’ll embed with engineering, design, and production partners to champion quality end-to-end—from planning and requirements through implementation, release, and live operations. You will lead quality strategy and execution across multiple projects and two team pods, ensuring risk-based test planning, automation, and release gating are applied at every stage of the SDLC. You’ll collaborate with other Quality Leads across Player Experience to develop scalable solutions and shared standards that improve signal and efficiency across teams. This role reports to a Senior QA Manager.

Responsibilities:

• Own the end-to-end test strategy and master test plan for RC desktop features across Windows/macOS, including risk models, entry/exit criteria, and release readiness signals.

• Drive the end-to-end test automation strategy for RC using Playwright (TS/JS)—set and enforce Test automation standards for selectors, fixtures, test data, and environment orchestration; mentor engineers and review test code to raise signal quality.

• Drive CI/CD quality signal and pipeline health—integrate and scale suites (parallelization, sharding, retries, flake detection), own dashboards and alerting, and make data-backed go/no-go calls tied to stability SLOs and release criteria.

• Lead cross-team collaboration (Engineering, Product, Design, Release, game teams, external partners) to land joint test plans, manage dependencies, and resolve risks/blockers, and making clear data-backed go/no-go decisions.

• Guide and review manual, exploratory, and deep-dive testing where automation isn’t economical; ensure coverage of failure modes, recovery, and rollback paths.

• Establish quality telemetry (pass rates, defect escape, stability, performance) and drive continuous improvement with data-backed experiments.

• Define and enforce standards and playbooks for bug quality, repro, triage, and regression control; improve cycle time and defect removal efficiency.

• Provide technical leadership to internal and vendor QA (mentorship, code reviews, pairing, test design workshops).

• Champion desktop-specific quality: installers/auto-update, patching, OS permissions, network/offline modes, localization, accessibility, and performance.

• Secure quality at integration boundaries (services, auth, social) via mocks, contract tests, and environment strategy

• Collaborate with Eng leaders to incident response (root cause analysis, containment, verification) and harden rollback/feature-flag strategies.

• Collaborate with different disciplines in order to understand their goals and incorporate them into decisions that improve quality.

• Instruct junior QA external testers in their day-to-day tasks.

• Hold the team accountable to meeting quality standards

Required Qualifications:

• 8+ years in QA/Quality Engineering with 3+ years leading quality for multi-team, multi-quarter programs.

• 2+ years hands-on with Playwright (TypeScript/JavaScript), including framework design, CI integration, and flake triage.

• Strong understanding of desktop application testing (Windows/macOS): installers, patching systems, auto-updaters, OS-level constraints, and network variability.

• Proficiency with Jira (defect lifecycle) and Zephyr or similar test management tools.

• Solid grasp of JavaScript/TypeScript and familiarity with React or web-tech-based shells (e.g., Electron/CEF-style UIs).

• Experience embedding with developers/design/release teams; comfortable driving cross-discipline decisions and trade-offs.

• Fluency with Git and CI/CD systems (e.g., Jenkins, GitHub Actions) and artifact/report publishing.

• Demonstrated QA leadership of mixed internal + vendor teams; ability to set direction, review work, and hold partners to SLAs.

Desired Qualifications:

• Proven QA leadership across multi-quarter programs and multiple work streams; sets direction, drives decisions, and holds teams (internal + vendor) to quality bars and SLAs

• Automation ecosystem exposure—Playwright Test runner, Cypress or similar; basic API testing and contract testing experience a plus.

• CI/CD fluency—integrated tests into pipelines (parallelization, sharding, retries, flake detection), owned dashboards/alerts, and made data-backed go/no-go calls.

• Desktop application testing on Windows/macOS (installers, patching/auto-update, OS permissions, network/offline modes, recovery/rollback).

• Strong JS/TS fundamentals and familiarity with React or web-tech shells (Electron/CEF); able to review test code for reliability and maintainability.

• Quality telemetry & metrics—defines/uses KPIs (escape rate, stability, pass rate, MTTR/MTTT) to guide prioritization and drive continuous improvement.

• Risk-based testing & strategy—threat modeling, failure-mode coverage, contract tests/mocks for service and integration boundaries (e.g., auth/social).

• Cross-team collaboration with Engineering, Product, Design, Release, and external partners; excellent written/verbal, executive-ready status & decision logs.

• Vendor stewardship—scope/SLAs, playbooks, coaching, and performance management for partner QA teams.

• Tooling familiarity—Jira/Zephyr (or equivalents), Git, and CI/CD systems (Jenkins/GitHub Actions/CircleCI).

• Performance, accessibility, and localization awareness for desktop client experiences; comfortable integrating these checks into pipelines.

• Incident response experience—verification, root cause partnering, and hardening via rollback/feature-flag strategies.

For this role, you'll find success through craft expertise, a collaborative spirit, and decision-making that prioritizes your fellow Rioters, who are the customers of your work. Being a dedicated fan of games is not necessary for this position!

Our Perks:

Riot focuses on work/life balance, shown by our open paid time off policy and other perks such as flexible work schedules. We offer medical, dental, and life insurance, parental leave for you, your spouse/domestic partner, and children, and a 401k with company match. Check out our benefits pages for more information.

At Riot Games, we put players first. That mission drives every decision in our quest to create games and experiences that make it better to be a player. Whether you’re working directly on a new player-facing experience or you’re supporting the company as a whole, everyone at Riot is part of our mission. And just like in our games, we’re better when we work together. Our goal is to create collaborative teams where you are empowered to bring your unique perspective everyday. If that sounds like the kind of place you want to work, we’re looking forward to your application.

It’s our policy to provide equal employment opportunity for all applicants and members of Riot Games, Inc. Riot Games makes reasonable accommodations for handicapped and disabled Rioters and does not unlawfully discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, national origin, age, handicap, veteran status, marital status, criminal history, or any other category protected by applicable federal and state law. We consider for employment all qualified applicants, including those with criminal histories, in a manner consistent with applicable federal, state and local law, including the California Fair Chance Act, the City of Los Angeles Fair Chance Initiative for Hiring Ordinance, the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance for Employers, the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, and the Washington Fair Chance Act.

Per the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance, the following core duties may create a basis for disqualifying candidates with relevant criminal histories:

• Safeguarding confidential and sensitive Company data

• Communication with others, including Rioters and third parties such as vendors, and/or players, including minors

• Accessing Company assets, secure digital systems, and networks

• Ensuring a safe interactive environment for players and other Rioters

These duties are directly related to essential operations, safety, trust, and compliance obligations within our organization. Please note that job duties may evolve based on business needs and additional responsibilities may be assigned as necessary to maintain operational efficiency and security.