Senior QV Tester & QV Pod Lead · EA Tiburon

Quality is where I started.
Production is where I'm headed.

I'm Chris La Croix, a Senior QV Tester and QV Pod Lead at EA Tiburon who operates at the intersection of quality, development, and production. From owning a QV pod on an unannounced title to running playtest events alongside lead producers, I ship games by connecting the people who make them.

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Madden 26
Shipped · AAA Sports
QV Pod Lead
Unannounced Title
Dev + Prod
Cross-Discipline Trust
// Shipped Titles

Games I've Helped Ship

Every title below represents cross-team coordination, quality ownership, and direct collaboration with development and production.

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
// Production Track Record

Already Doing the Job

The best evidence I'm ready for production isn't a title change. It's the production work I'm already trusted with today.

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

Work directly alongside production to keep dev-team playtesting running smoothly, frequently leading playtest events side-by-side with the lead producer, from logistics to feedback capture.

Signal: Production partnership
// The Pitch

Why Associate Producer

Great producers remove friction between disciplines. That's been my job in practice for years. QA is where every discipline's work collides, and senior QA means being the person who sees the whole board.

I've spent my career translating between engineers, artists, designers, and producers. I know what slips a milestone, what a realistic bug burn-down looks like, and how to run an event where the whole dev team shows up ready to play.

My background in IT, gaming, and photography gives me a technical foundation, a player's instinct, and a trained eye for visual quality. Production is where all three pay off at once.

01

Cross-team fluency

Daily collaboration with dev, design, and production, including engine-level work with engineering.

02

Ownership mindset

Pod owner accountable for coverage, priorities, and comms, not just executing someone else's plan.

03

Process builder

Prototyped AI-assisted tooling that other QA teams now use to build test design briefs faster.

04

Event leadership

Runs playtest events with lead producers: scheduling, logistics, facilitation, and follow-through.

// 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
Production
Milestone readinessSprint planningStandups & reviewsStakeholder reportingAgile / ScrumCross-discipline comms
Quality
Test plan authoringCoverage strategyDefect triageCertification supportRelease readinessDesign intent review
Engines, Platforms & Tools
FrostbiteUnreal EnginePlayStation SDKXbox GDKSwitch SDKMayaSubstance PainterJIRAConfluencePower BI
Languages
English (native)French Creole (native)French (conversational)

Want the full details in one page?

Download Resume (PDF)
// Contact

Let's Ship Something Together

Open to Associate Producer opportunities in the games industry. If you're building a team that values production partners who've earned trust on the ground, let's talk.

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