I design the systems that make a QA organization's quality measurable and its people accountable.

01 · About Me

About me

I’m Nilesh Kasimahanti, a QA Lead at Electronic Arts in Hyderabad. I own quality strategy and delivery for the F1 franchise across PS5, Xbox, PC, and Mobile, and I lead a distributed QA team split across the EAIN and EARO studios.

I started at PTW in 2021 as a Trainee Test Engineer and was promoted to Senior in fourteen months. I moved to EA in 2023 and became QA Lead in 2025. Most of what I do now is building the systems underneath quality: rating models, test taxonomies, and reporting that hold up without me in the room.

Outside of work I follow Formula 1 closely and spend time on independent product research, mostly applying product management frameworks to mobile games I play. Some of that research is in the writing section below. I hold certifications in project management from Google and ISB, and a postgraduate program in product management from Accredian.

How I lead

I currently lead and mentor a team of 20 testers on the F1 franchise, down from 37 at the team’s peak after a planned ramp-down, across two distributed studios (EAIN and EARO). The number I’d rather you look at is the 9-box model in the work section. The real test of “I lead a team of X” isn’t the headcount. It’s whether every person on that team can tell you exactly why they’re rated where they are.

That’s the philosophy behind the role-adjusted scoring: a QA Tester and a Quality Analyst are doing different jobs, so I don’t hold them to the same bar and then call the result “objective.” Development conversations start from the same rubric the rating did, which means they’re about a specific, evidenced gap, not a vibe.

I was promoted to Senior in 14 months at PTW, largely by being the point of escalation between clients and internal delivery on two concurrent titles. That role taught me the cost of unclear ownership before I had the authority to fix it myself. Everything I’ve built since is downstream of that lesson: a team runs better when the criteria are written down and nobody has to guess.

02 · Experience

Experience

• Jul 2025 – Present

  QA Lead / Project Lead

  Electronic Arts, Hyderabad

  Own the full project lifecycle for F1 franchise releases; lead and mentor a distributed QA team; maintain executive-level stakeholder reporting; track project health via Power BI dashboards.

  • Own the full project lifecycle for F1 franchise releases (PS5, Xbox, PC, Mobile): developing detailed project plans, defining scope, setting milestone schedules, allocating resources across teams, and tracking delivery against committed timelines.
  • Lead and mentor a QA team across distributed global studios (EAIN and EARO), 37 at peak and 20 on the current roster following a planned ramp-down; own onboarding, day-to-day direction, and performance alignment.
  • Maintain executive-level stakeholder reporting, translating project status, risks, and scope changes into clear summaries for senior leadership; act as the central point of contact across production, engineering, and operations teams.
  • Proactively identify and manage risks, issues, and dependencies; track project health via Power BI dashboards and escalation workflows, ensuring corrective action is taken before issues impact schedule or quality.
  • Built and own the weighted 9-box performance rating model and the 90-case seasonal regression plan detailed in the work section.
• Jun 2023 – Jul 2025

  Senior Quality Assurance Engineer

  Electronic Arts, Hyderabad

  Coordinated parallel delivery workstreams for F1 24 and F1 25; built automated status reporting via Power Automate and QMetry, cutting manual reporting overhead by roughly 6 hours a week.

  • Coordinated parallel delivery workstreams for F1 24 and F1 25; maintained Jira (JaaS) for issue tracking, escalation, and resolution across engineering, QA, and production teams simultaneously.
  • Automated three recurring jobs that were costing me roughly 6 hours a week: the daily task email, build transfers to the systems team, and first-pass checks on every new build including online services connectivity.
  • Built automated status reporting via Power Automate and QMetry; produced milestone summaries and documentation used by account and production leadership for planning and review.
• Jan 2023 – Jun 2023

  Senior Test Engineer

  PTW, Hyderabad

  Promoted to Senior in 14 months. Primary point of contact between clients, community managers, and internal delivery on two concurrent titles (both under NDA); signed off on test requests from remote vendor teams.

  • Promoted to Senior in 14 months; served as primary point of contact between clients, community managers, and internal delivery teams on two concurrent titles (both under NDA), managing requirements, coordinating resolution, and reporting project status to client stakeholders.
  • Signed off on test requests from remote vendor teams and owned release readiness communication back to the client.
• Oct 2021 – Dec 2022

  Trainee Test Engineer

  PTW, Hyderabad

  Authored project documentation, test plans, and onboarding materials; executed functional, regression, and compatibility testing across devices and platforms.

  • Authored project documentation, test plans, and onboarding materials; shadowed PMs across sprint and release lifecycles.
  • Executed functional, regression, and compatibility passes across devices and platforms; logged and tracked defects in Jira through to fix validation.

03 · Work

How I define and measure quality

Both systems below started the same way: an existing process was subjective, inconsistent, or nonexistent, and I built something auditable in its place.

04 · Certifications

Certifications & recognition

• Certificate of Excellence, Star Performer

  Q4 2022 (Oct–Dec 2022)

  PTW

  • Awarded for performance across the quarter I was promoted to Senior Test Engineer.
  • Signed by the QA Manager and the Director of Human Resources.
  View certificate →

• PGP in Product Management

  Program Nov 2022–Feb 2024

  Accredian

  • Product analytics foundations: ARPU, LTV, retention and churn measurement.
  • The framework work in the writing section below came out of this program.
  View certificate →

• Product Management Job Simulation

  May 2025

  Electronic Arts (via Forage)

  • Understand key performance indicators.
  • Plan a data-driven presentation.
  View certificate →

• Google Project Management

  Mar 2024

  Google (via Coursera)

  • Six-course professional certificate: foundations, initiation, planning, execution, Agile, and a capstone.
  • Publicly verifiable at coursera.org/verify/professional-cert/CES8WTBXAKM2.
  Verify certificate →

• IT Project Management

  Issued Jul 2022

  Indian School of Business (ISB Executive Education)

  • Scope, schedule, and risk management for technical programs.
  • Stakeholder reporting and escalation structures.
  View certificate →

05 · Skills

Skills

06 · Writing

Independent Product Analysis: Game Economy & Monetization

Everything in this section is personal research, done in my own time with public industry data. It isn’t EA or PTW work product. I keep it separate from my QA work on purpose: it’s evidence of how I think about a product, not evidence of what I was assigned to do.

None of this was assigned. It’s the clearest evidence I have that I read a product’s numbers and ask what’s driving them: the same instinct a QA Lead needs to prioritize risk, and a TPM needs to prioritize scope.

07 · Contact

Let's talk

I’m open to QA Lead and QA Manager roles at game studios, and to conversations about technical program management as a next step. The fastest way to reach me is email.

• Emailkasimahantinilesh@gmail.com
• LinkedInlinkedin.com/in/nilesh-k-215b39210
• Phone+91 9989130310
• LocationHyderabad, India