Senior QA Engineer for Poker Product

A5 Labs builds technology for some of the largest online poker and mobile gaming operators in the world: game clients, tournament back office, and the security systems that detect bots and AI-assisted play. Fully remote company. The QA team is 15 people spread from China to Portugal, and we are adding one more.
 

Read this before you apply

This role has two hard requirements. If you don't meet both, please don't apply — it will waste your time and ours.

1. You know poker at a near-professional level. "I play with friends sometimes" is not enough. You should be comfortable discussing ranges, ICM, solver output, tournament structures and cash-game formats without looking anything up. In the interview we ask questions like:

• What edge cases should be tested in a Mystery Bounty MTT?
• You have access to the MTT back office. Which parameters would you set to break the tournament under the hood, and what would you expect to see on the client?
• Describe a spot in NLHE where folding pocket kings preflop is correct.

If those questions sound hard, this is not the role for you.

2. You work without being pushed. Everyone here is remote and your manager is often in a different timezone. Nobody will assign you tasks every morning. We expect you to see what needs testing, take it, and say plainly when something is blocked, late, or when you made a mistake. Sitting idle and waiting for a ticket, or hiding problems from your manager and the team, is the fastest way to fail here.

 

What you will do

• Test new and existing features of poker software: game clients (iOS, Android, web, desktop) and the tournament/back-office tools behind them.
• Write the test design before execution: test cases in TestRail, with clear coverage of the feature, its edge cases and its integrations with other systems.
• Run regression on every release and keep the regression suite up to date.
• Find, reproduce and report bugs in Jira with enough detail that a developer can fix them without asking you follow-up questions.
• Investigate issues reported by real players and turn them into reproducible bugs or a clear "not a bug" with evidence.
• Pick the parts of your area that should be automated and automate them (Playwright or Cypress), integrated with the rest of the team's automation.
• Work directly with the Product Manager and developers on your team. You own quality for that team: nobody signs off on your behalf.
• Report on what was tested, what wasn't, and what risk remains before each release.
• Use AI as a working tool, not a novelty. The QA team uses Claude.ai every day: to build internal QA tools, to generate and review test designs, to analyze logs and bug reports, and directly in testing. You will be expected to do the same and to find new places where it saves the team time.
• If you perform well, grow the area: more scope, and potentially your own sub-team.
  
   

What we require

• Poker proficiency close to a professional level (see above). You know what VPIP, PFR, ICM and a solver are without asking an LLM.
• 5+ years of hands-on QA in a fast-paced product environment.
• Strong experience testing native mobile apps on both iOS and Android, plus web applications.
• Strong test design skills: you can take a feature spec and produce a test case set with real coverage, not a list of happy paths.
• Hands-on experience with a test case management tools and Jira.
• Basic hands-on experience with Playwright (AI approach to building test automation is a plus)
• Ability to understand how the application interacts with external systems (payments, back office, game servers) and test those boundaries.
• Hands-on daily use of AI tools (Claude, ChatGPT or similar) to speed up your own QA work: test design, scripting, data generation, log analysis, writing automation. You should be able to show concrete examples of how AI made you faster, not just say that you "use it".
• English C1 or higher, spoken and written. All communication is in English.

• Experience working in Scrum or Kanban teams.

  
   

Nice to have

• Previous work on a poker or casino product (client or back office).
• Experience with API testing and reading logs / database queries to verify results.

• Experience building a QA process from scratch in a growing team.
   

   

What you get

• Fully remote, permanently. Work from wherever you are.
• Quarterly performance bonus on top of your salary. In a good quarter, you earn 4 months' salary for 3 months of work.
• Unlimited vacation. We judge output, not hours logged. When you need rest, take it.
• A QA team of 15 experienced engineers across the globe to learn from and compete with.
• Claude.ai and other AI tools are part of the standard toolkit here, not something you have to ask permission for.
• Direct ownership: you decide what and how to test in your area, and you answer for the result.
  
   

About A5 Labs

A5 Labs is a Bay Area research and development company that designs and builds fair, safe and sustainable gaming solutions. We use large-scale data, machine learning and game theory to detect bots and AI-assisted gameplay, to measure player skill, and to dynamically adjust competitions so large online poker platforms stay healthy over the long term. Our technology runs inside some of the biggest mobile gaming sites in the world.