About the role
Craft: Technology & Development
Location: Stockholm - King - Malmskillnadsgatan | Barcelona - King - PG
Employment Type: Full time
Job Description
Engineering Manager – Game Platform Foundations
Are you a natural connector who thrives on developing great people and high-performing teams? Do you enjoy solving complex technical challenges while enabling hundreds of millions of players to have amazing gaming experiences?
Game Platform Foundations builds the platforms that make it fast, easy and safe to build and operate games, tools and services at King. We create the shared foundations that empower engineering teams to innovate faster, operate with confidence and continuously improve the player experience. As our platforms and technology continue to evolve, we’re investing in both our engineering capabilities and our people. That’s where you come in.
Your Role Within Our Kingdom
Game Platform Foundations is responsible for building and evolving the shared platforms that support King’s games and engineering teams. From backend platforms and cloud infrastructure to developer experience, agentic engineering and internal tools platforms, we provide the foundations that enable teams across King to build, ship and operate games at global scale.
Our mission is to make software engineering fast, easy and safe through intuitive self-service platforms, shared capabilities and scalable infrastructure. By improving developer experience and engineering effectiveness, we enable product teams to focus on creating amazing player experiences while we provide the platform products that help them succeed.
Key Responsibilities
- People Leadership & Culture: Inspire and empower engineers in your team, enabling them to build high-quality software while supporting individual growth through coaching, goal setting and continuous feedback. Responsible for recruitment, mentoring, coaching, performance management and fostering a collaborative, inclusive and psychologically safe team culture.
- Stakeholder Collaboration: Work closely with other Engineering Managers, Tech Directors and Software Engineers. Own stakeholder relationships at the team level, building trusted partnerships with engineering teams across King, aligning on delivery priorities and trade-offs, and ensuring your team’s work creates clear, measurable value for developers and players.
- Product Direction: Own the product direction for your team by defining the roadmap, translating the needs of King’s engineering community into clear priorities and making informed trade-offs.
- Delivery & Execution: Accountable for delivery, tracking progress, reporting with transparency and steering the team to hit commitments with precision and predictability. Continuously evolve products using productivity metrics and developer feedback to identify friction, experiment with improvements and measure success.
- Platform Domains: Work across backend systems and developer tooling, cloud infrastructure, observability, internal tools and agentic engineering.
- AI & Agentic Engineering: Guide the team’s adoption of AI tooling in ways that raise the quality and speed of good engineering decisions, ensuring that judgment, correctness and maintainability remain the bar regardless of how code is produced.
- Leadership Style: Maintain a humble and direct leadership style, comfortable making decisions with imperfect information, believing in pragmatic Agile ways of working and passionate about developing both people and technology.
Skills to Create Thrills
- Core Experience: Journey started with a passion for technology and problem solving, giving a solid understanding of software engineering and the challenges engineering teams face every day, combined with a discovery that helping people grow can be just as rewarding as building great software.
- Background: Experience leading software engineering teams together with a technical background in software engineering, distributed systems, cloud platforms or platform engineering.
- Technical & User Focus: Enjoys solving complex technical challenges while building shared platforms that enable other engineering teams to move faster, deliver with confidence and focus on creating value. Understands that great platforms are built with users in mind.
- Developer Experience: Cares about creating products and services that engineers love to use, with a passion for improving developer experience, engineering effectiveness and operational excellence. Comfortable leading through change, building strong relationships and creating an environment where engineers can do their best work.
Bonus Points
- Experience building or operating large-scale cloud platforms and distributed systems.
- Experience with platform engineering, internal tools platforms, developer experience or engineering productivity.
- Experience leading technical modernization and large-scale platform transformations.
- Experience from the gaming industry, or other industries operating complex, large-scale software platforms.
About King
With a mission of Making the World Playful, King is a leading interactive entertainment company for the mobile world with more than 20 years of history delivering iconic games in the mobile gaming industry, including the world-famous Candy Crush franchise and Farm Heroes Saga. Around 200 million people play a King game every month.
King, part of Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT), has Kingsters in Stockholm, Malmö, London, Barcelona, Berlin, Dublin, San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles and Malta.
Who We Are
King has 249 million monthly active users across web, social and mobile platforms, with games including Candy Crush, Farm Heroes, Pet Rescue and Bubble Witch. King was acquired by Activision Blizzard Inc. (Nasdaq ATVI) in February 2016 and operates as an independent unit of the company.
Our Passion
Making great games is incredibly challenging, but we challenge ourselves to dream bigger in a Seriously Playful way. We experiment, learn and adapt continuously to shape the industry, bringing moments of magic to players and playing as a team to have impact on a massive scale.