Job Description
Salary: £30-33k (DOE)
Location: Fully on-site at our offices in Witham, Essex in England.
Employment: Full-Time Employee role
About Dlala Studios
We're Dlala Studios, an independent game studio in Essex making games we love, with people we love, for people to love. We've worked with some of the biggest names in the industry, won a few Best Places to Work awards along the way, and we genuinely mean it when we say we're an employee-first studio.
We care about craft, we care about each other, and we believe great games only happen when the whole team takes pride in what they're building.
The role
We're looking for a Senior QA Tester who thinks about quality the way we do, not as a gate at the end of the process, but as something the whole team builds in from day one.
You'll be embedded with our small cross-functional QA team, working alongside designers, programmers, artists, and producers on our new unannounced PC/Console project. You'll find bugs, yes, but more importantly, you'll help the team understand them, prevent them, and not make them again. If you've ever caught yourself playing a game and immediately thinking ‘I wonder how they missed that’, we'd like to meet you.
What you'll be doing
* Lead exploratory testing across features, systems, and player journeys, getting stuck in early enough to shape things, not just report on them
* Design and evolve test approaches as new mechanics and systems develop
* Write clear, thorough bug reports, good repro steps, honest impact assessment, and a player-first lens
* Write and maintain your own test cases, providing planned full coverage for the project itself, as well as review test plans created by other QA Team members
* Contribute to test strategy across platforms, including performance, compatibility, and certification readiness
* Spot high-value opportunities for automation, including regression and smoke test coverage
* Support playtests and help the team translate player feedback into actionable improvements
* Work with our engineers to improve testability, logging, and CI pipelines
What we're looking for
* Solid experience in QA for console, PC, or multi-platform game development with Shipped titles on your CV
* Strong exploratory testing instincts and a critical eye for player experience, edge cases, and systemic risk
* Familiarity with issue tracking tools (Jira) and structured defect management
* Understanding of modern development practices like CI/CD and version control workflows
* A good grasp of performance considerations like frame rate stability and memory constraints
* Confidence communicating and collaborating across disciplines
* Comfortable working in iterative environments
* A strong attention to detail, and the ability to work autonomously within a given task whilst remaining confident to ask questions or seek help, as needed
* A positive presence that is eager to participate in Studio activities
Bonus points if you have
* Experience with Unity Engine
* Experience with Testrail
* Some scripting or programming ability to support automation
* Knowledge of console certification requirements
Why Dlala?
We work in an environment where ideas are welcomed, experimentation is encouraged, and quality is treated as a craft rather than a checkbox. You will be encouraged to take ownership of areas of the game related to your discipline and challenged in ways that will help you grow in your career and as a person. We offer flexibility across almost all areas of the working day, and we genuinely invest in our team's wellbeing, not just as a policy, but because it's the right way to work.
If you're passionate about games, endlessly curious about how things break, and motivated to help a team do their best work, we'd love to hear from you.