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Job Description:

Director of Engineering

Mission

Lead and scale a high-performing engineering organization that builds high-quality player experiences at pace. Operate as a systems-level thinker who simplifies complexity, embeds engineering excellence into product cycles, and fosters a culture of ownership, learning, and speed. Serve as a strategic partner to product, design, and data to drive outcomes, not just delivery.

Key Responsibilities

1. Technical Strategy & Execution

• Define and drive the engineering strategy aligned with product bets and growth ambitions.
  
• Ensure architectural decisions are forward-compatible, modular, and enable autonomy at the team level.
  
• Own the evolution of the tech stack to support rapid iteration, experimentation, and scalable systems.
  
• Champion and embed CI/CD, feature flagging, and test automation as core infrastructure for speed and quality.
  

2. Organisational Design & Team Health

• Architect an org structure that minimizes dependencies and handoffs while maximizing ownership and throughput.
  
• Maintain optimal management ratios to ensure leadership remains close to execution.
  
• Build and mentor a strong leadership bench (EMs, TLs, ICs), capable of operating with context and judgment, not escalation.
  
• Improve cross-functional team construction to reduce coordination drag and increase impact.
  

3. Culture & Craft Excellence

• Set and uphold engineering standards for quality, reliability, and maintainability—without gold-plating.
  
• Drive a culture of fast feedback loops, root cause over band-aids, and pride in craft.
  
• Foster T-shaped skill development and reduce siloed engineering specializations, in line with AI-driven convergence of roles.
  
• Ensure psychological safety, radical candor, and continuous improvement are operational norms, not values on slides.
  

4. Collaboration & Influence

• Act as a peer and challenger to product and design leadership, ensuring engineering has equal voice in shaping roadmaps and strategy.
  
• Elevate the contribution of engineering from feature delivery to product innovation and player experience.
  
• Operationalize shared ownership of estimation, prioritization, and problem discovery across disciplines.
  
• Shape and scale shared rituals across teams (e.g. retros, incident reviews, decision forums) to reduce divergence and duplicate friction.
  

5. Strategic Transformation Leadership

• Lead the transformation towards leaner, AI-augmented workflows and smaller, faster-moving teams.
  
• Act as a key agent in the rollout of transformation initiatives including org re-design, VSM improvements, and systemic upskilling.
  
• Drive clarity in roles, responsibilities, and technical decision rights across the engineering function.
  
• Contribute to a data-driven operating model where team performance, system reliability, and engineering ROI are measurable and managed.
  

Profile Requirements

Experience

• Proven experience leading engineering orgs of 30+ across distributed teams.
  
• Demonstrated success building and scaling product-engineering systems in a matrix or theme-based structure.
  
• Strong background in both architectural depth and organisational design.
  
• Hands-on experience embedding DevOps, CI/CD, test automation, and feature flag systems.
  
• Experience partnering with design, analytics, and product at a strategic level.
  

Skills & Traits

• Ruthless prioritization and systems-level clarity.
  
• Excellent strategic judgment and executional follow-through.
  
• Deep coaching and mentoring capability—especially with emerging EMs and senior ICs.
  
• Comfortable making decisions with 80% confidence and adjusting fast.
  
• Can operate in both high-ambiguity transformation contexts and structured delivery environments.
  

About King

With a mission of Making the World Playful, King is a leading interactive entertainment company with more than 20 years of history of delivering some of the world’s most iconic games in the mobile gaming industry, including the world-famous Candy Crush franchise, as well as other mobile game hits such as Farm Heroes Saga. King games are played by more than 200 million monthly active users. King, part of Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT), has Kingsters in Stockholm, Malmö, London, Barcelona, Berlin, Dublin, San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles and Malta. More information can be found at King.com or by following us on LinkedIn, @lifeatking on Instagram, or @king_games on X.