Director of Engineering

Director of Engineering

Mission

Lead and scale a high-performing engineering organization that builds high-quality player experiences at pace. Operate as a systems-level thinker who simplifies complexity, embeds engineering excellence into product cycles, and fosters a culture of ownership, learning, and speed. Serve as a strategic partner to product, design, and data to drive outcomes, not just delivery.

Key Responsibilities

1. Technical Strategy & Execution

• Define and drive the engineering strategy aligned with product bets and growth ambitions.
• Ensure architectural decisions are forward-compatible, modular, and enable autonomy at the team level.
• Own the evolution of the tech stack to support rapid iteration, experimentation, and scalable systems.
• Champion and embed CI/CD, feature flagging, and test automation as core infrastructure for speed and quality.

2. Organisational Design & Team Health

• Architect an org structure that minimizes dependencies and handoffs while maximizing ownership and throughput.
• Maintain optimal management ratios to ensure leadership remains close to execution.
• Build and mentor a strong leadership bench (EMs, TLs, ICs), capable of operating with context and judgment, not escalation.
• Improve cross-functional team construction to reduce coordination drag and increase impact.

3. Culture & Craft Excellence

• Set and uphold engineering standards for quality, reliability, and maintainability—without gold-plating.
• Drive a culture of fast feedback loops, root cause over band-aids, and pride in craft.
• Foster T-shaped skill development and reduce siloed engineering specializations, in line with AI-driven convergence of roles.
• Ensure psychological safety, radical candor, and continuous improvement are operational norms, not values on slides.

4. Collaboration & Influence

• Act as a peer and challenger to product and design leadership, ensuring engineering has equal voice in shaping roadmaps and strategy.
• Elevate the contribution of engineering from feature delivery to product innovation and player experience.
• Operationalize shared ownership of estimation, prioritization, and problem discovery across disciplines.
• Shape and scale shared rituals across teams (e.g. retros, incident reviews, decision forums) to reduce divergence and duplicate friction.

5. Strategic Transformation Leadership

• Lead the transformation towards leaner, AI-augmented workflows and smaller, faster-moving teams.
• Act as a key agent in the rollout of transformation initiatives including org re-design, VSM improvements, and systemic upskilling.
• Drive clarity in roles, responsibilities, and technical decision rights across the engineering function.
• Contribute to a data-driven operating model where team performance, system reliability, and engineering ROI are measurable and managed.

Profile Requirements

Experience

• Proven experience leading engineering orgs of 30+ across distributed teams.
• Demonstrated success building and scaling product-engineering systems in a matrix or theme-based structure.
• Strong background in both architectural depth and organisational design.
• Hands-on experience embedding DevOps, CI/CD, test automation, and feature flag systems.
• Experience partnering with design, analytics, and product at a strategic level.

Skills & Traits

• Ruthless prioritization and systems-level clarity.
• Excellent strategic judgment and executional follow-through.
• Deep coaching and mentoring capability—especially with emerging EMs and senior ICs.
• Comfortable making decisions with 80% confidence and adjusting fast.
• Can operate in both high-ambiguity transformation contexts and structured delivery environments.