QA Automation Engineer (Portugal & Remote)

At Arkadium our purpose is to have fun while creating fun - and that’s exactly what we’ve been doing for 20 years. We’re the creators behind the world’s most-played games. From the Solitaire that came on your Windows machine, to hundreds of other games you’ve come to know and love - you can find our games on Arkadium.com, iOS, Android, and lots of other big sites worldwide.

As a proud Evergreen business our values of Fierce Drive, Positive Energy and Living Full Lives are the driving force behind how we run and the choices we make.

We’re privately held (aka stable and reasonable about growth), founder-led (aka passionate about our craft) and we consistently rank as a “Best Place to Work” (aka not your typical games company).

We’ve been recognised by "Happiness Works 2023, 2024, 2025" in Portugal, "Crain's Best Places to Work 2022" and "Great Place to Work 2022 and 2023" in New York!

Interested in becoming an Arkadian? We’d love to hear from you!

Overview

Arkadium is looking for a highly autonomous and impact-driven QA Engineer to join our Core Tech team, the backbone that powers our games and platform ecosystem.

Core Tech operates as a backend-first team, building and evolving the shared services that enable a lot of the core functionalities in Arkadium’s games and platforms - from authentication, chat, tournaments, friends, inventory, and microtransactions, to multiplayer infrastructure (Nakama) and platform-wide capabilities.

This role is not about testing a single product. It’s about owning quality across distributed backend systems, partnering closely with backend engineers, and ensuring that our services are reliable, scalable, secure, and continuously deliverable.

You’ll act as an embedded engineer within the Core Tech team, with strong ownership over test frameworks, CI/CD pipelines, and quality strategy, balancing hands-on testing with system-level thinking and pragmatic decision-making.

While this role operates day-to-day as an embedded engineer within the Core Tech team, you’ll also be part of Arkadium’s QA department, focused on shared standards, tooling, best practices, and professional growth for QA Engineers.

What You’ll Do

• Own backend quality end-to-end for Core Tech services, acting as a quality partner to backend engineers rather than a gatekeeper, while aligning with (and contributing to) QA Chapter standards and practices.
• Design, develop, and maintain automated test suites focused primarily on:
• API & contract testing (using OpenAPI/Swagger definitions where applicable)
• Integration and service-to-service validation
• Load, performance and soak testing
• Collaborate as an embedded team member with Core Tech engineers early in the development lifecycle to influence architecture, testability, and quality decisions.
• Take ownership of CI/CD pipelines, ensuring build, deployment, and test pipelines are reliable, visible, and continuously evolving.
• Develop and evolve test pipelines and tooling, improving feedback loops, stability, and signal quality.
• Perform targeted manual testing (ex: complex flows, edge cases, exploratory scenarios).
• Validate security- and auth-critical flows, ensuring correctness and resilience across environments.
• Ensure data integrity across backend systems.
• Analyze test results, failures and incidents, turning them into actionable improvements.
• Leverage AI-assisted tools where appropriate to accelerate analysis, test design and investigation, while applying sound engineering judgment to all decisions.
• Champion a quality-first, pragmatic mindset within the team - optimizing real-world impact over process-heavy ceremony.

How You’ll Spend Your Time (Approx.)

• 40% – Test design, automation, and execution (API, integration, performance, etc)
• 30% – CI/CD ownership, pipeline reliability, and test infrastructure
• 30% – Quality strategy, collaboration, and continuous improvement

What We’re Looking For

• Proven experience as a QA Engineer working with backend or platform systems.
• Ability to work autonomously, take ownership, and drive quality initiatives end to end.
• Comfortable adopting new tools and technologies – including AI-assisted workflows – to improve efficiency, insight and quality outcomes.
• Strong experience testing REST APIs and backend services.
• Hands-on experience with automated testing frameworks (Playwright primarily, and JavaScript/TypeScript preferred).
• Experience integrating tests into CI/CD pipelines (Azure DevOps or similar).
• Solid understanding of modern backend concepts: HTTP(S), JSON, service boundaries, environments, and deployments.
• Comfortable working in Agile/Scrum environments as an embedded team member.
• Strong communication skills and a collaborative, engineering-first mindset.

Nice to Have

• Familiarity with gRPC and/or WebSockets.
• Familiarity with OpenAPI/Swagger for API documentation, contract validation and test generation
• Experience with performance, load, and soak testing.
• Knowledge of security testing, especially around authentication and authorization.
• Experience validating data migrations and persistence layers.
• Exposure to real-time or multiplayer systems (ex: Nakama).
• Familiarity with databases such as MySQL, PostgreSQL, or MongoDB.
• Experience with cloud platforms (Azure preferred; others welcome).
• Experience with Go or backend-heavy environments.

We offer:

• Competitive compensation with structured performance and career development check-ins
• Health insurance
• Additional budget for conferences you are interested in
• Personal development budget to fuel your passions and desire to learn (Arkadians are taking classes in not only Excel and leadership, but also interior design and even swimming!)
• Time off from Christmas Eve through New Year's Day so we can all enjoy the holidays
• A unique culture of transparency, true teamwork and fun
• Summer Fridays: Fridays off throughout the Summer to have more fun in the sun!

The above benefits may vary depending on location or country.

This is a 1‑year contract position. Candidates outside of Portugal will be engaged via Arkadium’s international payroll provider.

Candidates must be available to work standard hours from 09:00 to 18:00 in the Western European Time (WET) zone -(Portugal time zone), where most of the Engineering and Product teams are based.

Work Location & Hybrid Model (Portugal)

In Portugal, we operate under a hybrid work model that blends remote and in-office work. Employees may work from home or from the office depending on team and individual needs, ensuring both flexibility and strong collaboration.

If you reside in the Lisbon metropolitan area: you will be expected to work onsite one to three times per week, with specific days agreed upon with your manager. If you are based outside of Lisbon: a different onsite cadence will apply.