Electronic Arts

We are seeking a Principal Quality Designer to act as a local quality leader embedded alongside our development partners and executive stakeholders. This role sits at the intersection of engineering, product, and quality, helping ensure our quality vision, technology roadmap, and partner alignment remain tightly connected throughout the game’s development lifecycle. Reporting to the Head of Software Quality, this role will not initially have managerial responsibilities.

You will bring strong engineering literacy and product thinking skills to reinforce and extend the work of our Software Quality Architect (SQA) and Technical Director (TD). While the TD owns engineering execution and the SQA drives quality architecture, the Principal Quality Designer ensures teams remain aligned and informed in a complex, quick changing and high-visibility environment

This is a highly collaborative and influential role, not a hierarchical one. You will not manage the engineers or own the technical architecture. Instead, you will drive clarity, communication, alignment, and prioritization, ensuring the work of our quality teams is deeply connected to development goals, studio expectations, and emerging opportunities. You will also help create a lightweight, forward-looking rhythm of business that improves predictability and reduces thrash across stakeholders.

Key Responsibilities

Strategic Alignment & Cross-Functional Leadership

• Serve as the local point of contact for Software Quality and Process Alignment, representing our strategy and priorities to development leadership, corporate partners, and studio stakeholders.
 • Maintain alignment between remote QE/QV leadership, the SQA, the Technical Director, and the local dev team.
 • Shape and refine quality goals, ensuring they reflect the needs and expectations of partners across Engineering, Production, and Design.
 • Translate complex engineering, quality, and product needs into clear priorities, decision points, and communication streams.
 • Establish and maintain a lightweight rhythm of business (alignment check-ins, milestone readiness reviews, and decision forums) that keeps key partners coordinated and moving forward.

Initiative Ownership & Delivery Enablement

• Act as a product owner for software quality initiatives, ensuring clarity of requirements, scope, success criteria, and expected outcomes.
 • Track and communicate progress on strategic technology initiatives, automation plans, and quality programs using consistent, decision-ready artifacts.
 • Drive early visibility and closure on risks, issues, dependencies, and decisions, ensuring clear owners, mitigation paths, and escalation with options when tradeoffs are required.
 • Support roadmap and milestone planning by ensuring quality considerations and partner expectations are represented.
 • Partner with process architects to optimize and ensure adherence to new and established workflows.
 • Use structured improvement methods (e.g., Lean process mapping) to identify bottlenecks and redesign workflows for simplicity, speed, and adoption.

Quality Innovation & Technology Advocacy

• Champion the use of automation, AI/ML, telemetry, and data to reduce manual testing toil and improve test effectiveness.
 • Work with the SQA and TD to identify opportunities where emerging technology can accelerate detection, stability validation, and non-subjective testing.
 • Help evaluate new tools, frameworks, and approaches, prioritizing those that meaningfully impact developer efficiency and player experience.
 • Where appropriate, help define and communicate the expected impact of quality technology initiatives (e.g., reduced manual toil, earlier detection, improved stability, cycle-time improvements), including assumptions and how impact will be measured post-rollout.

Communication, Reporting & Leadership Influence

• Facilitate clear communication channels between local and remote leaders, ensuring alignment on goals, resourcing, risks, and opportunities.
 • Drive uniform reporting for software quality initiatives by establishing standard definitions, templates, and health signals, so leadership gets consistent visibility across teams.
 • Present updates, insights, and progress to leadership groups, tailoring communication for both technical and non-technical audiences.
 • Use a broad set of disparate data sources (automation results, telemetry, CI signals, defect trends, stability indicators, delivery metrics, partner feedback) to accurately measure the impact of strategic quality changes, tell a compelling story, and generate actionable insights.
 • Support a culture of continuous improvement, experimentation, and collaboration within the quality organization.
 • Lead adoption of new workflows and tooling through practical change enablement (stakeholder alignment, communication, lightweight training, and follow-up measurement).

Qualifications

• 10+ years of experience in software development, technical leadership, quality engineering, or a related hybrid role.
 • Strong engineering literacy, able to understand technical discussions, architectures, and tooling without needing to own them.
 • Proven ability to drive cross-functional alignment and execution through influence in complex, multi-location organizations.
 • Experience contributing to quality strategy, automation initiatives, or technology-driven operational improvements.
 • Demonstrated ability to integrate, validate, and synthesize inputs from multiple data sources into decision-ready narratives and actionable recommendations.
 • Comfortable interfacing with senior technical and executive leaders.

Desirable Skills

• Familiarity with quality engineering practices, automation frameworks, and telemetry systems.
 • Knowledge of modern AI/ML or LLM-based workflows for automation, reporting, data extraction, insight generation, or validation.
 • Experience with game engines such as Unreal, Frostbite, or Unity.
 • Exposure to Agile methodologies and software development lifecycles.
 • Ability to translate strategic goals into actionable plans and prioritized roadmaps.
 • Experience with Lean process mapping / reengineering and change enablement practices.