About the role
Role Overview
Senior Principal UX Designer (6 month Fixed-Term Contract). This position is a maternity cover. The role focuses on transforming the developer experience at King by resetting the continuous integration (CI) orchestration. You will work with Build & Infrastructure teams to modernise the CI ecosystem, address accumulated complexity, and simplify critical workflows for game teams.
Your Role within the Kingdom
- Define and lead research into King’s existing CI workflows, using appropriate qualitative and quantitative methods.
- Identify pain points, workarounds, and unmet needs, translating findings into prioritised outcomes and clearly articulated user stories, jobs to be done, or similar.
- Map current and future developer journeys across CI and the wider developer ecosystem.
- Work with engineers and game teams to design, prototype, and evaluate intuitive, efficient CI workflows.
- Facilitate workshops that build shared understanding, explore solutions, and align teams around priorities.
- Communicate complex systems and design decisions clearly, influencing initiative direction through evidence, systems thinking, and constructive challenge.
- Help establish sustainable practices for continuing to learn from users as our CI ecosystem evolves.
Skills and Experience
Must have
- Extensive experience as a senior UX, product, or service designer, with a track record of leading complex, high-impact work through expertise and influence.
- Deep user research expertise, including planning and leading substantial studies and turning findings into product direction and practical design decisions.
- Strong interaction and workflow design skills, particularly for complex tools, systems, or end-to-end user journeys.
- Experience applying jobs-to-be-done or comparable outcome-led frameworks.
- Confidence working closely with engineers and engaging with technical subject matter.
- Excellent facilitation, communication, and stakeholder-management skills, with the ability to create alignment around competing needs and constraints.
- The ability to work independently, bring structure to ambiguity, and balance user needs with technical and delivery considerations.
Particularly valuable
- Experience designing developer tools, internal platforms, or other products for technical users.
- Familiarity with continuous integration and delivery, build systems, or software-development workflows.
- Experience with Jenkins, Buildkite, or comparable CI/CD platforms.
- Experience simplifying legacy systems or supporting large-scale platform transformations.
- Knowledge of service design or systems thinking, particularly when working across interconnected tools, workflows, and teams.
- Experience working in a large-scale engineering or game-development organisation.
Success Metrics
In this role, success is defined by:
- A robust, evidence-based understanding of how game teams experience CI today.
- Clear priorities based on the outcomes users need to achieve, rather than just features of the existing system.
- Simpler, smoother, and more coherent CI workflows.
- End-to-end developer journeys that work well across the wider King ecosystem.
- Strong collaboration between Build & Infrastructure teams and the game teams they support.
- A sustainable foundation for continuing to improve the CI experience.
About King
King is a leading interactive entertainment company for the mobile world, with a mission of Making the World Playful. With over 20 years of history, King is responsible for iconic games including the Candy Crush franchise and Farm Heroes Saga, with approximately 200 million monthly players. King is part of Microsoft and operates out of locations including Stockholm, Malmö, London, Barcelona, Berlin, Dublin, San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles, and Malta.
Culture and Values
- King takes the art and science of gaming to the next level through curiosity, passion, respect, and love for players.
- Teams focus on experimenting, learning, and adapting to shape the industry.
- The company culture promotes playing as a team to have an impact on a massive scale.