Chris La Croix | Senior QV Tester & QV Pod Lead

Shipped Titles

Games I've Helped Ship

Every title below represents quality ownership at AAA scale: coverage strategy, certification, and direct collaboration with development.

Senior QV Tester Presentations & Visuals

Owned quality across the Presentations & Visuals space: the broadcast-style camera work, cinematics, and visual polish that define how Madden looks and feels to millions of players.

Drove visual quality bar across a high-visibility, fan-scrutinized feature area
Provided platform validation and first-party certification support for the Nintendo Switch 2 launch
Partnered directly with dev on engine-level investigation and minor fixes
Supported an annualized AAA release cadence with hard ship dates

Senior QV Tester QV Pod Lead Under NDA

Own a Quality Verification pod on an unannounced project, accountable for the pod's test coverage, priorities, and communication lines into development and production.

Full ownership of pod planning, coverage strategy, and reporting
Embedded with the dev team from early development, not post-hoc
Lead playtest events in partnership with the lead producer

Craft

Quality at AAA Scale

Senior QV means more than finding bugs. It means being trusted with the engine, building the tools, and running the events that keep a AAA project honest.

Source Code & Engine Access

Granted source code and engine access, approved by the Senior Game Creative Director, to work alongside the dev team on investigation and minor fixes. A level of trust rarely extended outside engineering.

Signal: Dev-team trust

AI-Assisted QA Tooling

Prototyped internal tools, built with AI assistance, that help other QA teams generate and structure test design briefs, turning a slow manual process into a repeatable pipeline.

Signal: Initiative & force-multiplication

Playtest Production

Own playtest sessions for a ~200-person dev team on an unannounced title, from build readiness and blocker triage to hosting the room, alongside the lead producer.

Signal: 200 sets of eyes on the build

Read the case study →

Approach

How I Approach Quality

The best bug is the one that never gets written. I define expected behavior with developers before implementation, review features against design intent, and flag risk ahead of sprint deliverables, so quality is built in rather than inspected in afterward.

When defects do land, craft matters: clear reproduction steps, honest severity, and root cause isolated across systems. A well-written ticket saves an engineer an hour; a vague one costs a day. I hold my pod's reporting to the first standard.

My background in IT, gaming, and photography gives me a technical foundation, a player's instinct, and a trained eye for visual quality: the reason I was trusted with Presentations & Visuals on Madden NFL 26.

Coverage strategy

Test plans, cases, and stories in JIRA and Confluence with entry and exit criteria, reusable across the feature lifecycle.

Defect craft

Clear repro steps, honest severity, root cause isolated across systems, and blockers escalated to resolution before milestones.

Release readiness

Platform validation and first-party certification, including submission support for the Switch 2 launch of Madden NFL 26.

Force multiplication

AI-assisted tooling other QA teams now use for test design briefs, plus playtests that put 200 sets of eyes on the build.

Foundations

Background

Three disciplines, one throughline: understanding how things are built, how they break, and how they should look.

IT

Technical roots in IT give me comfort with systems, pipelines, and tooling, and credibility in technical conversations with engineering.

Gaming

A career built inside game development at EA, with a player-first instinct for what quality actually means on the sticks.

Photography

A trained eye for composition, lighting, and visual polish, directly applied to owning Presentations & Visuals on Madden NFL 26.

Resume

Experience at a Glance

The full picture: from IT support roots to owning quality for a cross-discipline pod on a AAA title.

Senior QV Tester & QV Pod Lead

Electronic Arts, EA Tiburon · Orlando, FL

March 2025 – Present

Own quality scope for a cross-discipline pod of engineers, designers, artists, and producers. Single point of contact between the pod and project leadership. Credited on Madden NFL 26, including platform validation and first-party certification support for the Nintendo Switch 2 launch.

IMT Technical Technician

Full Sail University · Winter Park, FL

2024 – 2025

First point of contact for faculty and staff, triaging and routing technical requests across help desk, networking, and cybersecurity teams in a multi-campus environment.

Consultation Agent & Advanced Repair Agent

Geek Squad, Best Buy · Orlando, FL

2021 – 2025

Diagnosed and resolved hardware and software issues across macOS and Windows in a high-volume environment, isolating root cause across systems and configurations.

B.S. Entertainment Business (in progress)

Full Sail University · Winter Park, FL

Education

Quality

Test plan authoringCoverage strategyDefect triageCertification supportRelease readinessDesign intent review

Production

Milestone readinessSprint planningStandups & reviewsStakeholder reportingAgile / ScrumCross-discipline comms

Engines, Platforms & Tools

FrostbiteUnreal EnginePlayStation SDKXbox GDKSwitch SDKMayaSubstance PainterJIRAConfluencePower BI

Languages

English (native)French Creole (native)French (conversational)

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Download Resume (PDF)

Contact

Let's Ship Something Together

Open to senior quality verification and QA opportunities in the games industry. If you're building a team that treats quality as a craft and not a checkbox, let's talk.

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