Panel Manager (f/m/d) - Freelancer / Contractor; 100% remote possible

Panel Manager (f/m/d) 📍 Location: Remote (No Relocation) 💼 Employment Type: Contractor / Freelance ; 3 to 6 months contract About PlaytestCloud PlaytestCloud’s Player Insights Platform™ helps game studios improve their games through feedback from real players. Over 60% of the top-grossing game studios have tested their games with PlaytestCloud. 🏆 Premier provider for games. We help game studios worldwide make the best games they possibly can. 🏆 Built for player insight. We build technology that enables secure, high-quality remote game testing. 🏆 Independent and established. We are bootstrapped and profitable, with more than 400 paying game studios and over one million playtesters. Our player community PlaytestCloud runs one of the largest proprietary player panels in games: a large, growing, global community of players who take part because they care about making the games they play better. This isn't a role where you're building a panel from scratch. You'll be advising a mature Research Operations team that's already investing in the long-term health, quality, and strategic development of that community. Our goal is simple: help game studios make better decisions through real player insight. You'll play a central role in keeping that community trusted, representative, engaged, and ready for what game developers need next. About the role We're hiring an experienced, analytical Panel Manager (f/m/d) to shape the next stage of PlaytestCloud's proprietary player panel. Your job: figure out what makes a panel strong and scalable, then turn that understanding into measurable action. You'll identify the metrics that matter most, find opportunities to improve panel quality and availability, and build a practical framework that helps us serve studios better as we grow. This is a freelance contract (3–6 months) with a clear mission: build a stronger foundation for how we measure, manage, and grow our player panel. Key Responsibilities: Panel strategy and ownership. Take ownership of the health and growth of PlaytestCloud's global player panel. Metrics and insight. Define and track the metrics that connect panel performance, player experience, studio needs, and business growth. Opportunity identification. Analyze panel data to find the highest-impact opportunities, constraints, and risks. Actionable improvements. Turn insight into practical recommendations, and work with the right teams to implement and measure them. Cross-functional collaboration. Partner closely with Research Operations, Product, and GTM to make sure the panel supports great outcomes for our studios. Sustainable foundations. Set up a reporting rhythm, performance framework, and roadmap the team can keep using after the contract ends. Your profile Must-have: Panel experience. Recent hands-on experience managing, running, growing, or optimizing a large participant panel, research-participant community, or gaming community — including participant supply, retention, quality, segmentation, and/or incentive strategy. Commercial and analytical mindset. You know how to find the few metrics that actually matter, connect them to customer and business outcomes, and use data to make good calls. Tool competency. Comfortable querying databases in SQL, and familiar with agentic AI tools like Claude or Codex. Ownership. You're a self-starter who likes taking on an ambiguous challenge, building structure around it, and driving it forward on your own. Practical problem-solving. You turn analysis into clear priorities and action, not insight for its own sake. Strong communication. You can explain complex findings clearly to technical and non-technical people alike. Strong English. Comfortable communicating in written and spoken English on a remote, international team. Great to have: Qualitative research experience. Experience supporting or working closely with qualitative user research, including participant recruitment, study operations, interviews, usability testing, or research