Company: Cloud Imperium Games · Role: Embedded QA Specialist I - Tools · Oct 2025 to present
Project Overview
Cloud Imperium Games develops Star Citizen and Squadron 42, two of the most technically ambitious projects in the industry. I’m the sole QA embedded within the Tools team, covering the proprietary development tools and pipelines those games are built with.
The Tools team builds the proprietary applications and pipelines every other department depends on to make the game. That makes it an unusual QA assignment: the users of what I test are the developers, artists and designers building the universe. When a tool breaks it does not affect one feature, it can block an entire department.
My Role & Responsibilities
- Tools & Pipeline Testing: Continuously testing and providing feedback on proprietary development tools, to keep the content creation pipeline stable and efficient.
- Test Planning: Creating, executing and maintaining test cases to isolate complex technical issues, and streamlining testing procedures for global development teams.
- Sole Coverage: Being the only QA on the team means owning the whole area: prioritising what gets tested, and being the single point of accountability for its quality.
- Playtesting: Taking part in regular playtests and feeding findings back to the development teams.
- QA Knowledge Base: Maintaining detailed QA documentation covering test data, known issues and environment configurations.
- Point of Contact: Acting as the main contact and liaison for Tools team QA support, and composing regular progress updates and reports for leadership.
- Defect Management: Using Perforce and Jira to track, manage and verify bugs, systematically identifying technical conflicts so developers can resolve them faster.
The Challenge
Testing internal tools is a genuinely different discipline to testing a game.
A player facing bug affects players. A tools bug affects the people making the game, so the cost compounds: a broken pipeline can stall a whole department for a day. The bar for reliability is high and the feedback loop is immediate, because the people using what I test will tell you the moment something is wrong.
It also means quality is not only about defects. A tool can be entirely functional and still be slow, confusing or awkward, and that friction is a real cost multiplied across everyone using it. A large part of the role is spotting that friction and arguing for it as seriously as a crash.
Supporting global development teams adds another dimension. Testing procedures have to be clear and repeatable enough to work for people in other studios and time zones, which puts real weight on the documentation side of the job.
Why This Role Matters to My Work
This is the most technically embedded QA position I’ve held, and it sits alongside development rather than at the end of it. Owning a specialised area, being the named point of contact for it and reporting up to leadership is a different mode of working to project based publisher QA.
It has also sharpened how I think about pipelines and developer experience, which fed directly into building the content pipeline and release process for Skill Check at my own studio.
Technologies & Tools Used
- Perforce for version control and change tracking
- Jira for defect tracking and management
- Proprietary development tools and pipelines
- PC development
This page describes my role in general terms only. It contains no confidential details about Cloud Imperium Games' internal tools, unreleased features or development processes.