We’re Failbetter Games, an award-winning game development studio and makers of Sunless Sea, Sunless Skies, Mask of the Rose and Fallen London. We’re known for inventive narrative design, hand-crafted worlds and rich, atmospheric storytelling.

We’re looking for a Quality Analyst (or Senior Quality Analyst) to join our small in-house team. This position is permanent, remote, and full time, which for us means 35 hours a week.

The salary is likely to be between £31 600 and £41 100, depending on skills and experience. This is, as we understand it, higher than is typical for the games industry; we believe QA is a skilled position.

About the Role

In this role, you’ll be our sole tester, working primarily on an unannounced Unity project. Since we’re a small independent studio, your work is likely to be more varied than it might be at larger companies.

At the very core of the role, you’ll need to select suitable testing strategies, create and maintain your own test plans, find bugs, and document them in Jira, categorising them by severity and urgency so we can triage them. You’ll work closely with our producer, programmers, artists, writers and designers.

Often, you’ll test features on their own branches (we use Git), to protect the integrity of the main development branch. You’ll also smoke test builds for specific platforms (Windows, Mac, Linux, and consoles) to ensure they’re ready for public release.

The role will also involve qualitative feedback, some customer support for our past Unity games, and potentially aspects of release management.

Skills and Requirements

You don’t need a particular degree nor some arbitrary number of shipped titles or years’ experience to work for us. As long as you’re able to do the job well and can demonstrate that in your application, we’d love to hear from you.

What we can offer

Failbetter is committed to offering employees a safe, respectful environment, a healthy work-life balance, and transparent decision-making. We strive to avoid crunch and enthusiastically eliminate systemic sources of overtime. We don’t talk over one another in meetings, and we don’t expect all our employees to share the same hobbies and cultural references.

We’ve won a GamesIndustry.biz Best Places to Work award four years out of the last five, as well as their Diversity Award in 2022.

Further benefits of working here include:

• Flexible start times, and strong support for other forms of flexible working, like compressed hours
• Employer pension contributions
• Twenty-five days of leave in addition to UK public holidays
• Excellent provisions for parental leave
• Periodic consultations in which we invite subject matter experts to teach us about topics relevant to our work
• An annual, expenses-paid trip to a scenic part of the UK for our company gathering

Remote Work

The entire team is remote, and we expect to remain that way.

Our studio is based in the United Kingdom, but you don’t have to be. However, we do require that you be able to work our core hours, which are 11:00 to 16:00 UK time. Also, depending on your location, we might need to structure this as a contract position rather than direct employment: we’ve found that the administrative requirements for that can be impractical for a small studio like ours in some jurisdictions.

We typically find that these hours work best for people who live no more than three time zones away from the UK. If you think your personal circumstances might make you an exception, please explain why in your cover letter.

How to apply

We are taking open applications for this position until the role is filled. To apply, send us an email by 9:00 BST on Thursday 30 May, including all of the following:

• The role you’re applying for, in the subject line of your email.
• A cover letter in the body of your email. Please use this to let us know what you think may make you a good fit for the position and why it interests you. If your timezone is more than three hours away from the UK’s, please also tell us about any circumstances that would nonetheless make our core hours practical for you.
• A CV.

If you’re unsure whether to apply, we’re very happy to answer questions, which you can send to jobs@failbettergames.com.