Experienced QA Analyst - Victoria 3

Join Paradox Studios Red to help us develop Victoria 3 - an ultimate and unique social-economic grand strategy. We are not hiring a bug hunter with extra years attached. We are hiring the person who owns and champions the QA discipline on Victoria 3: someone who sets the direction for how we test, coordinates our internal and external QA, and raises the bar for what QA contributes to the project. You will be the project's main QA point of contact, a stakeholder in release sign-offs, and the person the team turns to when quality and schedule collide.

About the Job:

• You will still test the game. On this team, the experienced people and leads still test, plan, coordinate, and decide. Your added value is judgment and ownership, not distance from hands-on work.
• We expect ownership, not Jiras. Where a tester's job ends by reporting a bug, yours begins. When quality and schedule collide, you arrive with realistic, costed alternatives and a recommendation you're willing to own.

This role is 100% onsite in our Stockholm office.

What you will do

• Own the functional QA process end to end: test planning, testing coverage evaluation, merge-list curation, and Jira backlog monitoring.
• Represent QA in sign-offs and milestone decisions with a position and a rationale: arguing severity vs player impact, not forwarding questions upward.
• Own the bug life cycle: chase critical fixes to resolution, reassess reopened issues on impact rather than status, and monitor backlog trends before they become problems.
• Coordinate our external QA partner: everyone works from a briefed, prioritized queue.
• Build, maintain, and improve quality-tracking tools such as dashboards, burn-downs, and AI-assisted tooling, so that at any point in development, anyone can see the state of testing from data rather than gut feeling.
• Push QA innovation: propose and drive new approaches, including closed/open betas, branch testing, bucket systems, automation, and AI. Challenge our process before it fails, not after.
• Mentor and guide more junior QA analysts and testers, onboard new joiners, educate the wider project on how QA works, and advocate for QA's perspective in project decisions.

What you will need

• 5+ years of games QA experience, including at least one shipped or live title and time in an Analyst, Senior, or Lead capacity.
• Experience leading, mentoring, or coordinating other QA people.
• Experience with process ownership. For example, there’s a testing practice, tool, or process that exists or was killed because of you.
• Strong risk-based thinking: you prioritize under real constraints, make judgment calls with incomplete information, and own the outcome.
• Fluency with Jira or equivalent.
• Practical experience using AI tools to deliver on QA responsibilities or, at a minimum, solid prompting fundamentals and a genuine willingness to build with them.
• Communication that is clear, concise, assertive, and yet diplomatic.
• Fluent in spoken and written English.

Things to elevate your application

• Paradox grand strategies experience: Victoria 3, especially. Genuine interest in the genre and willingness to go deep matter more than logged hours.
• Scripting or programming skills (Paradox script, C++ experience) or hands-on QA automation.