About the role
Role Purpose
Game Platform Foundations builds the platforms that make it fast, easy, and safe to build and operate games, tools, and services at King. The focus is on creating shared foundations that empower engineering teams to innovate faster, operate with confidence, and continuously improve the player experience.
Key Responsibilities
- Leadership and People Development:
- Inspire and empower engineers to build high-quality software.
- Support individual growth through coaching, goal setting, and continuous feedback.
- Manage recruitment, mentoring, performance management, and foster a collaborative, inclusive, and psychologically safe team culture.
- Stakeholder Management:
- Work closely with other Engineering Managers, Tech Directors, and Software Engineers.
- Build trusted partnerships across King to align on delivery priorities and trade-offs.
- Ensure team work creates clear, measurable value for developers and players.
- Product Direction and Delivery:
- Own the product direction for the team, including defining roadmaps and prioritizing needs.
- Accountable for delivery, tracking progress, and reporting with transparency.
- Guide the team to hit commitments with precision and predictability.
- Evolve platform products using productivity metrics and developer feedback to identify friction and measure success.
- Technical Scope:
- Work across platform domains: backend systems and developer tooling, cloud infrastructure, observability, internal tools, and agentic engineering.
- Guide the adoption of AI tooling to raise the quality and speed of engineering decisions while ensuring correctness and maintainability.
Required Skills and Experience
- Leadership: Experience leading software engineering teams.
- Technical Background: Solid understanding of software engineering and challenges faced by engineering teams. Proficiency in:
- Software engineering
- Distributed systems
- Cloud platforms
- Platform engineering
- Platform Mindset: Passion for building shared platforms, improving developer experience, engineering effectiveness, and operational excellence.
- Soft Skills:
- Humble and direct leadership style.
- Comfortable making decisions with imperfect information.
- Belief in pragmatic Agile ways of working.
- Comfortable leading through change.
- Ability to build strong relationships across teams.
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 in the gaming industry (or other industries operating complex, large-scale software platforms).
About King
King is a leading interactive entertainment company for the mobile world, with over 20 years of history. The company mission is "Making the World Playful." Key titles include the Candy Crush franchise, Farm Heroes Saga, Pet Rescue, and Bubble Witch. King operates as an independent unit of Microsoft, with teams located in Stockholm, Malmö, London, Barcelona, Berlin, Dublin, San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles, and Malta.