QA Lead: Rigging & Tools; Remote

• Location:
  
  Remote (with in person / travel as needed)
• Reporting:
  Head of Product

We are looking for a QA Lead who came up through technical art. You have rigged characters in Maya, shipped tools into Unreal, and can usually tell where a deformation pipeline will break before anyone files a bug. This is a senior, hands-on role for a technical artist or pipeline TD who moved into quality and wants to own it.

You will own how our products get tested. You write the test strategy and the test suites for Ozone for Maya, Ozone for Unreal, and our Unreal subdivision plugin. You run them, you chase the failures down, and you hand finished cases to our automation engineers to codify. Developers, product, and QA engineers are all in this with you, but the hard part, working out how to make the product hold up under everything a customer will throw at it, is yours.

In this role, your objectives include:

• Own QA for Ozone for Maya, Ozone for Unreal, and the Unreal subdivision plugin, from the first test plan through release sign-off.
• Write the test suites: functional, regression, performance, and the ugly edge cases, all built around how riggers and animators really use these tools rather than how the spec says they should.
• Write cases our automation engineers can implement without coming back to ask questions, which means the starting state and the expected result are specific enough that nothing is left to interpret. You and they decide together what gets automated next.
• Build and maintain the test asset library: the rigs and scenes that push on skinning, deformation, subdivision, and export across every DCC and engine version we support.
• Run the manual passes yourself when the failure is visual or behavioral and only a trained rigging eye will catch it.
• Get in at the spec stage with engineering and product, so features are built to be testable and we understand the risk before code lands.
• Triage and reproduce defects, own the bug queue, and bring the evidence behind every ship or hold decision.
• Track coverage, escaped defects, and regression trends, then report them so the rest of the team knows where the product stands.
• Build and execute performance tests and profiling.

In your day-to-day, your responsibilities include
:

• A test suite that follows real customer workflows and catches regressions before customers do.
• Documentation clear enough that an automation engineer can build from it on the first read.
• Bug reports that reproduce every time, with the variables already narrowed down and enough context to fix on the first attempt.
• Release calls you can defend: what you tested, what you did not, and what risk is left.
• Engineers and product managers pull you in early, because features come out cleaner when you are involved.
• Coverage grows every release, and fewer bugs reach customers.

You have proven experience and qualifications in
:

• 5 to 8 years in technical art, character rigging, or pipeline TD work, with real time spent owning QA for creative tools or a production pipeline.
• Real depth in Maya: rigging, skinning, deformers, constraints, and the scripting and plugin side of it. Production time in Unreal on top of that.
• You have built a test suite from nothing before. Test plans, case design, coverage strategy, regression management, all of it.
• Strong Python. You can read the code, write your own test harness, and dig through logs and scene data until you find the cause.
• You know the animation pipeline from DCC to engine, including skeletal meshes, subdivision, LODs, and import and export paths, and you know which handoffs tend to break.
• You have worked with automation engineers and know what a case has to look like before it can be automated.
• You write clearly. A bug…