Engineering Manager

Role Overview

As an Engineering Manager in Candy Crush Soda Saga's Gameplay and Monetisation Domain, you will combine line management with hands-on technical leadership across the systems that define how Soda is played, rewarded, and monetised. Your work spans core gameplay mechanics, monetisation flows, content delivery at scale, and the internal tooling that powers them.

Your Role Within the Kingdom

• Line Management: Report to the Domain Engineering Lead, line-manage and grow a group of engineers working across multiple feature teams in Gameplay and Monetisation. Responsibilities include hiring, onboarding, performance management, mentoring, and coaching. Contribute to building stronger connection, clarity, ownership, and psychological safety across the Domain.
• Strategic Partnership: Partner with Product Managers, Design and Creative, QA, and engineering peers to shape and deliver roadmaps. Coordinate dependencies across feature teams, align on longer-term plans, and ensure the Domain's work aligns with Soda's product vision and goals, fitting cleanly into the broader game and platform ecosystem.
• Technical Leadership: Provide hands-on technical leadership, contributing to the codebase on a regular basis as an IC or Tech Lead embedded within a feature team. Review designs, surface technical risks early, guide architectural choices, and balance speed and quality against Soda's broader technical direction and shared technology platforms.
• Cross-Domain Representation: Represent Gameplay and Monetisation in cross-domain and cross-Soda engineering forums. Share learnings, contribute to shared engineering standards and ways of working, and bridge engineers into the wider tech community at King.
• Experimentation: Champion a strong experimentation culture using A/B tests, live data, and player insights to drive technical and product decisions, ensuring the engineers you support feel accountable for measurable player and business outcomes.

Skills to Create Thrills

Experience

• Leading and developing software engineers, including performance management, career growth, and day-to-day coaching in a product development environment.
• Strong technical background, able to engage deeply in design and architecture and contribute to a C++ codebase on a regular basis.
• Planning and delivering complex technical solutions, balancing short-term needs with longer-term architectural and product goals, ideally in a high-scale or game-as-a-service context.

Knowledge & Skills

• Strong grasp of modern software engineering practices (testing, code review, CI, observability) and a track record of contributing to and upholding shared engineering standards.
• Proficiency in C++ and the ability to reason about mobile performance, memory, frame-time budgets, and stability at scale.
• Comfort working in an experimentation-driven environment, including designing, interpreting, and acting on A/B tests and using live data to guide technical decisions.
• Ability to collaborate effectively with non-technical partners, translating between technical and business perspectives and aligning stakeholders around clear, practical plans.

Key Attributes

• Values-based, team-first leader with a down-to-earth, collaborative style who leads by example and builds trust across disciplines.
• Comfortable operating amid ambiguity: able to move forward when priorities or requirements are still evolving, make pragmatic trade-offs, and adjust course as you learn.
• Curious, proactive, and outcome-focused, with a strong sense of ownership for both team health and the impact of the team's work on players and the business.

Technical Context

• Codebase: Large, mature C++ codebase delivered to millions of mobile players for over a decade.
• Tools & Platforms: Purpose-built internal tooling for content, level design, and live configuration, alongside King's shared platforms for analytics, experimentation, and live operations.

How We Work

• Model: Team First, Hybrid Working model. Teams decide how they want to work together, with a mix of in-office and home working.
• Inclusivity: Candidates who do not meet every single requirement are encouraged to apply. King values potential as much as experience.

About King

King is a leading interactive entertainment company for the mobile world, part of Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT). With more than 20 years of history, King delivers iconic games including the Candy Crush franchise and Farm Heroes Saga. King games are played by more than 200 million monthly active users, with teams located in Stockholm, Malmö, London, Barcelona, Berlin, Dublin, San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles, and Malta.