Associate Director of Engineering (12 month FTC)

Craft:

Technology & Development

Job Description:

King operates mobile games at a massive scale. With titles like Candy Crush, Bubble Witch and Farm Heroes, our technology powers joyful moments for hundreds of millions of players every day.

As an Associate Engineering Director at King, joining on a 12‑month fixed‑term contract (FTC), you own the effectiveness and performance of the Game Economy engineering area. You are a seasoned software engineering leader who is comfortable supporting multiple teams in parallel, maintaining a transversal context while helping them balance day‑to‑day operations with continuous improvement. You work seamlessly at a strategic and tactical altitude, building capabilities in teams and working with other product & technical leaders to shape the short, medium, and long‑term direction for Game Economy.

Your Role Within Our Kingdom

You will work across multiple engineering teams in Game Economy, maintaining a strong transversal context while supporting day‑to‑day operations and improving how teams work, both individually and together. You combine servant leadership, hands‑on coaching, technical stewardship, and delivery excellence to help teams and leaders do their best work, sustainably.

You will:

• Set and communicate clear direction for your area in partnership with Product and other leaders, translating company and domain strategy into a coherent set of goals, roadmaps and operating models across Game Economy teams.

• Support multiple teams in parallel, helping individual contributors to prioritise, unblock work, and stay aligned without taking ownership away from them.

• Shape and refine ways of working – tuning processes team by team (ideation, solution discovery, execution planning, development, testing, incident management) and introducing lightweight, scalable patterns that work across the domain.

• Ensure effective performance management by maintaining clear expectations, recurrent feedback, and growth plans for individuals and teams.

You Will, Among Other Things…

People & Organisational Leadership

• Support and develop engineering teams in Game Economy, creating a high‑trust, inclusive environment where people can grow and have meaningful impact.
• Ensure individual and team performance management is in good shape: clear expectations, regular feedback, and well‑run performance and career growth conversations.
• Spot and address organisational and process issues that get in the way of delivery or team health, and work with leaders to adjust responsibilities, collaboration patterns, or interfaces as needed.
• Raise and evolve leadership standards by coaching and mentoring senior engineers, helping them strengthen their judgement, feedback skills, and stakeholder management.

Technical & Product Strategy

• Partner with technical leaders (e.g. Principal Engineers, Technical Directors) and Product leadership to ensure the technical strategy and product strategy for your area are aligned and executable.
• Ensure your organisation delivers reliable, scalable and maintainable systems, with clear standards for architecture, documentation, observability, security and “Royal Road” standardised approaches.
• Maintain a strong understanding of the architectural landscape and key systems in your domain, using that context to challenge trade‑offs and support strategic technical decisions without needing to be the deepest expert.
• Support the evolution and consistent use of shared standards, platforms and tools across teams so that your area behaves as a cohesive, scalable system rather than disconnected parts.

Delivery, Execution & Change

• Support and continuously refine the operating model for your teams: planning cadences, dependency management, risk management, and how OKRs/mission roadmaps are defined and tracked.
• Own delivery predictability and portfolio‑level outcomes across your teams, balancing business priorities, tech‑enablement work, and operational responsibilities.
• Anticipate and manage cross‑team risks and dependencies, ensuring issues are surfaced early and resolved in partnership with other leaders before they become blockers.
• Lead change at the area level – from strategy shifts to reorgs to cross‑domain initiatives – by creating structured change plans, aligning leaders, and ensuring changes land sustainably in teams.

Culture, Ways of Working & Continuous Improvement

• Establish and scale a strong feedback and accountability culture across your area, where collaborating, speaking up, and constructive challenge are expected.
• Champion knowledge sharing, documentation and cross‑team collaboration so that your organisation operates as a shared capability, not a collection of silos.
• Own quality and operational standards across your domain, ensuring consistent expectations for engineering quality, incident prevention, documentation, and responsible use of AI‑assisted engineering.

Skills to Create Thrills

You have a great passion for engineering leadership at scale and a solid sense of quality, long‑term impact and organisational health. You are analytical, systems‑thinking and genuinely interested in how strategy, organisation design, culture and architecture come together to deliver player and business value.

You will likely have:

• Extensive experience leading multiple engineering teams in a complex product, platform or game environment.
• A proven track record of designing and evolving organisations – adjusting structures, roles, processes, and operating models to match strategy and growth.
• Strong stakeholder skills and the ability to partner effectively with senior leaders across Product, HR, Finance and other functions to align priorities, budgets and capacity.
• A solid engineering background (e.g. backend, platforms, game services, data or live operations) with enough depth to support and challenge technical leaders and to understand architectural implications of organisational decisions.
• Demonstrated experience driving cross‑team or domain‑level improvements in engineering processes, SDLC, quality, productivity and documentation.
• Excellent communication skills; you can move comfortably between executive‑level discussions, cross‑domain forums and detailed conversations with managers and technical leaders.
• Experience working in or with live operations / game services / large‑scale consumer products is a strong plus.

A Great Saga Needs All Sorts of Heroes

Making games is fun. Especially when you do it with people who share the same idea of what makes a good workplace great. We design games for everyone, no matter where they are or who they are, and we employ all sorts of people from all kinds of backgrounds to bring them to life.

Truth is, we simply can’t expect diversity in our players and originality in our games without first nurturing it in our people. A great saga needs all sorts of heroes. And that’s it.

We’re Seriously Playful

Officially, we’re a leading interactive entertainment company for the mobile world. Unofficially, we’re a serious business that’s not afraid to have fun. Every day at King, we mix intuition with logic, art with science and magic with mathematics to create the games the world loves to play.

Together with our parent company, our mission is to bring moments of magic to everyday life. If you think this is something you can help us achieve, let’s talk. At King, we bring moments of magic to hundreds of millions of players every day — and we’re just getting started. Join us on the journey.

About King

With a mission of Making the World Playful, King is a leading interactive entertainment company with more than 20 years of history of delivering some of the world’s most iconic games in the mobile gaming industry, including the world-famous Candy Crush franchise, as well as other mobile game hits such as Farm Heroes Saga. King games are played by more than 200 million monthly active users. King, part of Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT), has Kingsters in Stockholm, Malmö, London, Barcelona, Berlin, Dublin, San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles and Malta. More information can be found at King.com or by following us on LinkedIn, @lifeatking on Instagram, or @king_games on X.