About the role
Role Overview
Game Platform Foundations builds the platforms that make it fast, easy, and safe to build and operate games, tools, and services at King. The team creates shared foundations that empower engineering teams to innovate faster, operate with confidence, and continuously improve the player experience. The role focuses on backend platforms, cloud infrastructure, developer experience, agentic engineering, and internal tools.
Key Responsibilities
- People Leadership: Inspire and empower engineers, supporting individual growth through coaching, goal setting, and continuous feedback.
- Team Management: Responsible for recruitment, mentoring, performance management, and fostering a collaborative, inclusive, and psychologically safe team culture.
- Product Direction: Own the product direction for the team by defining roadmaps, translating the needs of the engineering community into priorities, and making informed trade-offs.
- Stakeholder Management: Build trusted partnerships with engineering teams across King, aligning on delivery priorities and ensuring the team's work creates clear, measurable value.
- Delivery Accountability: Track progress, report with transparency, and steer the team to meet commitments with precision and predictability.
- Platform Evolution: Use productivity metrics and developer feedback to identify friction, experiment with improvements, and measure success.
- AI Integration: Guide the team’s adoption of AI tooling to raise the quality and speed of engineering decisions while ensuring correctness and maintainability remain the primary standards.
Candidate Requirements
- Technical Background: Solid understanding of software engineering and experience leading software engineering teams.
- Domain Experience: Practical knowledge in areas such as software engineering, distributed systems, cloud platforms, or platform engineering.
- Platform Mindset: Understanding that great platforms are products, with a focus on developer experience, engineering effectiveness, and operational excellence.
- Leadership Style: A humble and direct leadership style with comfort in making decisions based on imperfect information.
- Methodologies: Belief in and application of pragmatic Agile ways of working.
- Soft Skills: Ability to lead through change, build strong relationships across teams, and create an environment where engineers can do their best work.
Bonus Qualifications
- 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 (though candidates from other industries operating complex, large-scale software platforms are also welcomed).
Company Information
King is a leading interactive entertainment company for the mobile world, with a mission of "Making the World Playful." The company has over 20 years of history and delivers iconic titles including the Candy Crush franchise and Farm Heroes Saga. King serves approximately 200 million monthly active players and is part of Microsoft. The company has offices in Stockholm, Malmö, London, Barcelona, Berlin, Dublin, San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles, and Malta.