Associate Director, Game Security Operations

Job Title:

Associate Director, Game Security Operations

Requisition ID:

R026829

Job Description:

Your Mission

The Associate Director, Game Security Operations leads two critical disciplines within the Game Security organization: operational enforcement and threat intelligence. This role is responsible for the daily effectiveness, strategic development, and cross-functional alignment of threat intelligence and enforcement capabilities across Activision titles.

This leader ensures high-quality intelligence feeds engineering and product teams, enforcement pipelines operate at scale, and the studio’s security posture stays ahead of adversarial actors such as cheat developers, exploit sellers, fraud networks, bot operators, and other abuse ecosystems.

What you bring to the table

Priorities can often change in a fast-paced environment like ours, so this role includes, but is not limited to, the following responsibilities:

Program Leadership

• Serve as the operational leader for Enforcement Operations and Threat Intelligence, ensuring both functions deliver reliable, high-quality outputs that support engineering, data science, legal, player support, and game development teams.
• Translate intelligence findings and enforcement trends into clear recommendations for priorities, scope, and risk posture, feeding into engineering and product management roadmaps.
• Act as a key advisor to the Sr. Director on adversarial shifts, operational gaps, resourcing needs, and long-term program maturity.
• Coordinate with Ricochet team leadership to express requirements, validate operational feasibility, and advocate for tooling or workflow improvements.

Team Leadership

• Lead the team responsible for identifying, analyzing, and reporting on threats across cheat ecosystems and adjacent areas of concern to Team Ricochet as needed.
• Ensure that intelligence is timely, actionable, and packaged appropriately for engineering countermeasures, product feature planning, enforcement decisions, and executive awareness.
• Cultivate external intelligence partnerships with platforms, researchers, vendors, industry coalitions, and law enforcement.
• Oversee enforcement workflows, ensuring accurate, scalable, and defensible actions against cheating, exploit abuse, botting, and fraud.
• Maintain clear SOPs, quality controls, documentation standards, and operational metrics to support auditability and minimize false positives.
• Collaborate with Data Science and Engineering to refine detection models, thresholds, heuristics, and enforcement systems.
• Partner with Player Support, Legal, and Comms to support enforcement messaging, appeals processes, and policy interpretations.

Operational Excellence

• Lead operational readiness for Team Ricochet, ensuring enforcement and intelligence functions respond quickly and coherently.
• Develop and own KPIs and reporting for enforcement effectiveness, intelligence value, operational stability, and adversarial ecosystem impact.
• Continually establish and improve processes to meet the requirements of Ricochet Anti-Cheat, including those aimed at operational efficiency, impact, and timeliness.
• Establish career pathways, training programs, and skill development frameworks suitable for game security operations personnel.
• Foster a culture of analytical rigor, execution excellence, and high-accountability operations.

Expectations:

Operations

• Runs the day-to-day and week-to-week operations of team Ricochet, converting strategic direction into concrete operational plans, priorities, and measurable outcomes.
• Ensures the quality and usefulness of intelligence reporting.
• Oversees enforcement workflows, operational accuracy and efficacy, and litigation support.

Leadership

• Identifies gaps in workflows, tooling, processes, and coverage in order to improve overall efficiency and efficacy.
• Serves as the primary operational partner for teams within Ricochet and Activision at large, ensuring that operational needs are well-represented and aligned with other core functions.
• Leads enforcement operations and threat intelligence teams by developing talent through coaching, feedback, training, and delegation.

Player Profile

Minimum Requirements:

Experience 

• 10+ years of experience in Game Security
• 5+ years of experience in Anti-Cheat Operations
• 5+ years of experience in Threat Intelligence
• 3+ years of experience establishing and leading teams in operations and/or intelligence
• Deep understanding of cheat-related risks and threats at scale

Knowledge & Skills

• Degree in Cybersecurity or equivalent experience

Key Attributes

• Strong leadership & communications skills
• Ability to translate strategic goals to tactical processes and objectives

Your Platform

Activision Central Tech works to support our development studios and their titles. Comprised of seven main teams, we have many specialties including big data, privacy and security, motion capture and animation pipeline technologies, graphics, build and infrastructure for studio development and data centers, optimization, systems programming and online services including matchmaking and networking. Central Tech is distributed globally with offices across the U.S., and in Canada, England, Ireland and Japan.

Most of our teams are comprised of both engineering and research talent, allowing us to always have an eye on the future. Our talented engineers help with title development and provide valuable knowledge sharing between studios while our researchers are action-oriented and keep a strong connection with the needs of the game studios.

Central Tech is part of Activision. To learn more about us and our research, please visit us at https://research.activision.com/.

Our World 

At Activision, we strive to create the most iconic brands in gaming and entertainment. We’re driven by our mission to deliver unrivaled gaming experiences for the world to enjoy, together. We are home to some of the most beloved entertainment franchises including Call of Duty®, Crash Bandicoot™, Tony Hawk’s™ Pro Skater™, and Guitar Hero®. As a leading worldwide developer, publisher and distributor of interactive entertainment and products, our “press start” is simple: delight hundreds of millions of players around the world with innovative, fun, thrilling, and engaging entertainment experiences.

We’re not just looking back at our decades-long legacy; we’re forging ahead to keep advancing gameplay with some of the most popular titles and sophisticated technology in the world. We have bold ambitions to create the most inclusive company as we know our success comes from the passionate, creative, and diverse teams within our organization.

We’re in the business of delivering fun and unforgettable entertainment for our player community to enjoy. And our future opportunities have never been greater — this could be your opportunity to level up.

Ready to Activate Your Future?

We love hearing from anyone who is enthusiastic about changing the games industry. Not sure you meet all qualifications? Let us decide! Research shows that women and members of other under-represented groups tend to not apply to jobs when they think they may not meet every qualification, when, in fact, they often do! We are committed to creating a diverse and inclusive environment and strongly encourage you to apply. 

We are an equal opportunity employer and value diversity at our company. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status, among other characteristics.

We are committed to working with and providing reasonable assistance to individuals with physical and mental disabilities. If you are a disabled individual requiring an accommodation to apply for an open position, please email your request to accommodationrequests@activisionblizzard.com. General employment questions cannot be accepted or processed here. Thank you for your interest.

Rewards

We provide a suite of benefits that promote physical, emotional and financial well-being for ‘Every World’ - we’ve got our employees covered!  Subject to eligibility requirements, the Company offers comprehensive benefits including:

• Medical, dental, vision, health savings account or health reimbursement account, healthcare spending accounts, dependent care spending accounts, life and AD&D insurance, disability insurance;
• 401(k) with Company match, tuition reimbursement, charitable donation matching;
• Paid holidays and vacation, paid sick time, floating holidays, compassion and bereavement leaves, parental leave;
• Mental health & wellbeing programs, fitness programs, free and discounted games, and a variety of other voluntary benefit programs like supplemental life & disability, legal service, ID protection, rental insurance, and others;
• If the Company requires that you move geographic locations for the job, then you may also be eligible for relocation assistance.

Eligibility to participate in these benefits may vary for part time and temporary full-time employees and interns with the Company.  You can learn more by visiting https://www.benefitsforeveryworld.com/.

In the U.S., the standard base pay range for this role is $124,400.00 - $230,300.00 Annual. These values reflect the expected base pay range of new hires across all U.S. locations. Ultimately, your specific range and offer will be based on several factors, including relevant experience, performance, and work location. Your Talent Professional can share this role’s range details for your local geography during the hiring process. In addition to a competitive base pay, employees in this role may be eligible for incentive compensation. Incentive compensation is not guaranteed. While we strive to provide competitive offers to successful candidates, new hire compensation is negotiable.