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