About the role
Contract
Fixed-term maternity cover until the end of 2027.
About Side
Side is a global video game development and services provider, delivering technical and creative solutions to many of the world's leading game developers and studios. Founded in 2009, with over 30 years of experience through its parent company in Japan, Side operates studios across North America, Europe, South America, and Asia. Services include game development, art production, audio production, quality assurance, localisation, localisation QA, player support, community management, and datasets.
The Role
The Head of Post Production provides strategic and operational oversight across people, resources, quality, technology, workflows, capacity, and continuous improvement. This is a senior leadership role combining audio Post Production expertise, people leadership, operational management, commercial responsibility, and workflow transformation.
Key Responsibilities
Leadership & Team Development
- Lead and develop the global Post Production function, creating a collaborative, accountable, and high-performing environment.
- Provide leadership and direction to Post Production Managers and the wider team.
- Set clear departmental objectives, priorities, and performance expectations.
- Coach and develop managers and team members, building capability and supporting career progression.
- Identify skills and capability gaps and implement appropriate development or recruitment solutions.
- Support succession planning and the effective rollout of new initiatives.
- Partner with HR on organisational structure, recruitment, performance, progression, and employee matters.
- Empower managers to lead effectively.
Operations, Capacity & Resource Management
- Maintain overall accountability for the effective delivery of Post Production services.
- Oversee resource and capacity planning across multiple concurrent projects.
- Ensure resources are allocated effectively while balancing client requirements, employee workload, and commercial considerations.
- Work with Audio leadership to research and introduce more efficient workflows and technologies.
- Monitor operational performance and address delivery risks, capacity constraints, and resourcing issues.
- Maintain effective escalation processes for complex technical, resource, and client matters.
- Partner with Production and other teams to support effective project planning and delivery.
- Ensure robust processes are in place for project documentation, asset management, archiving, and workflow control.
Quality & Technical Leadership
- Establish and maintain appropriate Post Production quality and technical standards.
- Ensure dialogue editing, QA, mastering, and other services consistently meet client specifications.
- Maintain oversight of significant quality issues and ensure appropriate corrective action.
- Ensure the team maintains the technical expertise required to support services.
- Maintain oversight of Post Production hardware, software, DAWs, and related technologies.
- Provide technical leadership and credibility to support and challenge specialist teams.
Commercial & Financial Management
- Develop and manage the Post Production departmental budget in partnership with Finance and senior leadership.
- Monitor utilisation, resource costs, overtime, and external or freelance expenditure.
- Ensure resourcing decisions support project budgets and commercial objectives.
- Use operational and financial performance data to identify opportunities to improve efficiency and profitability.
- Support commercial assessment and capacity planning for new and expanding client opportunities.
- Provide Post Production input into pricing, resource requirements, and capacity discussions.
- Identify and escalate potential financial or operational risks.
Client & Stakeholder Management
- Act as the senior Post Production point of contact for significant client, quality, and technical matters.
- Build strong relationships across Production, Audio, Finance, and other internal functions.
- Provide expert Post Production input into client discussions.
- Support the resolution of complex or escalated client issues.
- Work closely with other department heads to ensure effective cross-functional delivery.
- Represent Post Production within senior operational and business discussions.
- Ensure client feedback and lessons learned are incorporated into future processes and service development.
Strategy, Technology & Continuous Improvement
- Develop and implement the Post Production operational roadmap in line with wider business objectives.
- Identify opportunities to improve quality, efficiency, scalability, and commercial performance.
- Lead the development and implementation of improved workflows, automation, and technology.
- Use AI-assisted tools and automated workflows to improve the efficient processing of large volumes of audio files.
- Develop Post Production capabilities to support new services and changing client requirements.
- Establish appropriate departmental KPIs and use operational data to identify trends and improvement opportunities.
- Ensure lessons learned are translated into operational improvements.
- Collaborate with global teams to develop consistent standards and share best practice.
Requirements
- 7+ years' relevant experience within commercial audio Post Production, ideally within video games, localisation, entertainment, or creative services.
- Significant experience operating in a Post Production leadership or management role.
- Demonstrable experience leading, coaching, and developing technical or creative teams and managers.
- Strong knowledge of dialogue editing, QA, mastering, and commercial audio Post Production workflows.
- Demonstrable experience using AI-assisted tools and automated workflows to process high volumes of files efficiently, ideally across multiple languages.
- Strong working knowledge of Pro Tools and other relevant DAWs and audio technologies.
- Experience managing resource and capacity planning across multiple concurrent projects.
- Experience managing departmental or project budgets and understanding the commercial impact of resourcing decisions.
- Experience monitoring areas such as utilisation, overtime, freelance or external spend, and operational performance.
- Demonstrable experience designing and improving workflows, processes, and operational standards.
- Strong client-facing and senior stakeholder-management experience.
- Experience working within a high-volume, deadline-driven commercial services environment.
- Strong analytical capability and experience using KPIs and operational data to inform decisions.
- Experience working across multilingual or localisation projects is highly advantageous.
Desired Attributes
- Strategic and commercially minded.
- People and development focused.
- Quality driven.
- Collaborative and influential.
- Forward thinking and solutions-focused.
Working Environment
The role holder is expected to promote the safety and comfort of colleagues, freelancers, talent, clients, and vendors, and ensure compliance with Side's security, confidentiality, IT, HR, health and safety, and ethical standards.