Head of Levels, Senior Director

Craft:

Games Design & Production

Job Description:

About Shared Tech

Shared Tech is the engine that powers all our live games. With the aim of providing the best possible experience for our developers and creators, as well as our hundreds of millions of players, our extensive team is integral to delivering King’s mission of Making the World Playful.

Dedicated to keeping our talented game makers productive, we enable the Kingdom to create, build, launch and operate every King game, across a vast number of platforms and mobile devices. Working with many technologies and tools, our analytics and AI & ML platforms enable the instrumentation of large-scale data aggregation, experimentation, and optimization of our players’ experience. We are the stage where King games love to perform!

Role Overview

We are seeking a Senior Director, Head of Levels to lead the engineering organization responsible for level creation, automation, and management across King’s game portfolio. This is a strategic and operational leadership role within Game Production (Shared Tech), focused on building the scalable, AI-powered systems and tooling that underpin our level production pipeline, from generation and play-testing to publishing and optimization.

You will lead a team of ~25 engineers (including managers) and act as the primary engineering partner for Candy Core, owning commitments, delivery, and quality for all Levels-related technology. Your mandate includes defining the multi-year strategy for level automation, ensuring reliable production workflows, and fostering strong collaboration between Shared Tech and our game teams.

Key Responsibilities

1. Leadership & Strategy

• Build, lead, and inspire the Levels engineering organization (~25 people), including managers and senior ICs.

• Set and communicate a clear technology vision and roadmap for level creation and automation.

• Translate corporate and functional strategy into actionable goals for the Levels organization.

• Partner with Candy Core Product to align on roadmap priorities, success measures, and outcomes.

• Develop and execute a two-year technology strategy for scalable, AI-driven level management and automation.

2. Delivery & Ownership

• Act as the single-threaded engineering owner for the Levels domain within Game Production.

• Own delivery commitments, quality, and reliability for level automation and management tooling.

• Maintain high operational standards with clear SLAs, observability metrics, and performance dashboards.

• Ensure systems and workflows scale efficiently across multiple franchises and game teams. 

3. AI-Driven Level Automation

• Shape the technical strategy for automated level generation, play-testing, and iterative tuning.

• Partner with data science and AI/ML experts to drive the adoption of intelligent systems that reduce manual effort and improve time-to-value.

• Define and deliver measurable outcomes, such as increased automated level output and reduced manual tweak costs.

4. Workflow Efficiency & Cost Optimization

• Streamline level production workflows end-to-end from creation through play-testing to publishing.

• Optimize infrastructure and tooling costs through automation, reuse, and process efficiency.

• Deliver meaningful cost improvements, e.g., reducing manual tweak costs by 50% within the first year.

5. Platform Reliability & Scalability

• Ensure level management tools and platforms are dependable, observable, and scalable.

• Drive standardization across games while balancing flexibility for unique franchise needs.

• Steward the technical investments that enable cross-game reuse and long-term platform resilience.

6. Stakeholder Alignment

• Collaborate with Candy Core, game producers, and Shared Tech leadership to define shared goals and OKRs.

• Maintain transparent joint planning and a shared stack-ranked priority list across partner teams.

• Foster trust and alignment between game teams, engineering, and product leadership.

Essential Experience & Skills

Technical & Domain Expertise

• Deep understanding of level design and production workflows in live games.

• Experience integrating AI/ML into creative pipelines, procedural generation, automated play-testing, and quality assessment.

• Proven ability to build scalable, reliable game ops and content management systems.

Leadership & Strategic Skills

• Proven experience leading multi-team engineering organizations (20-40+ people).

• Strong track record of managing managers and senior technical leaders.

• Strategic thinker who can balance long-term vision with near-term delivery.

• Exceptional communicator with the ability to align diverse stakeholders and influence across functions.

• Skilled in change management, guiding teams through transformation with empathy and clarity.

About You

You are a visionary engineering leader who thrives at the intersection of creativity, technology, and scale. You understand the art and science of game level creation, and you’re passionate about enabling teams to build more, faster, and better through automation, AI, and world-class tools. You balance strategic clarity with execution excellence - and you love to lead teams through meaningful, player-impacting change.

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.