Senior UX Design Manager

Craft: UX & UI

Job Description:

The Senior UX Manager at Level 13 is a cross-functional, strategic design leader who operates at the intersection of player experience, product outcomes, and craft excellence. You will be responsible for end-to-end creative leadership across a product theme or initiative, with accountability for the quality, coherence, and player impact of the design output. You lead through influence and ownership—not control—and you elevate both design standards and cross-craft collaboration. This is not a role for individual brilliance or decorative design. It’s for a systems thinker who can embed quality and player value into the core operating model.

Shape Key Responsibilities

1. Strategic Design Leadership

• Own the end-to-end creative vision within a product theme, translating strategic goals into coherent, high-quality player experiences.
• Drive decision-making on design principles, quality benchmarks, and experiential polish within the theme.
• Actively contribute to product strategy, shaping priorities, trade-offs, and constraints through deep design and player understanding.
• Serve as a key design voice in cross-functional triads with PM and Tech, ensuring design is a driver of product direction, not an afterthought.

2. Executional Craft and Systems

• Set the creative bar and ensure alignment with player-first and quality-first principles.
• Lead the design and rollout of scalable systems (e.g. design systems, UX patterns, interaction frameworks) that drive consistency and speed.
• Embed feedback loops within delivery, ensuring continuous refinement—not just delivery.
• Own and enforce the standard of “definition of done” from a design perspective: nothing ships that doesn’t meet it.

3. Team Empowerment and Growth

• Lead a small team of designers (embedded or centralized) across one or multiple initiatives.
• Coach, mentor, and elevate the craft maturity and ownership mindset of individual contributors.
• Create space for ICs to drive parts of the work while ensuring alignment with the broader design system and player goals.
• Drive peer feedback culture and ensure regular critique and quality elevation rituals.

4. Cross-Craft and Cross-Functional Collaboration

• Operate as a key driver of integrated collaboration across design, product, art, tech, and data.
• Define and reinforce shared rituals and processes that reduce hand-offs and duplication.
• Ensure design is deeply embedded from problem discovery to post-launch iteration.
• Actively reduce dependency on PM as the coordination hub; design should pull its own weight in driving progress.

5. Continuous Improvement and Cultural Leadership

• Actively challenge legacy ways of working—simplify processes, eliminate friction, and remove noise.
• Champion growth mindset: give and receive feedback, use data to disprove biases, and treat iteration as the job.
• Represent “One Soda” mentality: no silos, no turf wars—just collective ownership for what ships and how it impacts players.
• Model ownership, urgency, and rigor in all interactions.

Role Expectations

• Scope of influence Area-wide or multi-team impact; key driver of cross-theme design standards
• Autonomy Operates independently; escalates only systemic blockers
• Output Ownership Accountable for both design quality and how well the design serves business and player goals
• Communication Frames design problems clearly, influences without ego, and drives alignment across functions
• Mentorship Directly grows ICs through structured coaching, feedback, and delegation
• Craft Elevation Improves not just outcomes, but the system that produces them (e.g. via playbooks, reviews, templates)

What Success Looks Like

• Clear player value delivered in every major release within your scope.
• Design team members under your guidance grow in clarity, capability, and confidence.
• Fewer meetings, fewer approvals, faster feedback cycles—and higher design impact.
• Other disciplines seek your input early, not because they must, but because it improves outcomes.
• The product becomes more intuitive, cohesive, and delightful over time—and this is traceable to your leadership.

Required Skills & Experience

• 8–10+ years in product design, UX, or game design, with at least 3 years in leadership or principal-level roles.
• Proven ability to lead complex, multi-stakeholder initiatives from problem space to shipped solution.
• Deep fluency in systems thinking, interaction design, and player-centered development.
• Demonstrated ability to grow others, not just deliver yourself.
• Strong collaboration skills across product, engineering, data, and marketing.
• Comfortable with ambiguity, complexity, and change.
• Thrives in transformation.

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 @kinggames on X.

About Us

We bring moments of magic to hundreds of millions of people every single day. We create unforgettable games that are loved around the world.

We take the art and science of gaming to the next level through curiosity for the unexplored, passion for games, respect for each other, and love for our players.

Who we are

King is a leading interactive entertainment company for the mobile world, with people all around the world playing one or more of our games, including franchises such as Candy Crush, Farm Heroes, Pet Rescue and Bubble Witch. We have 249 million monthly active users as of fourth quarter 2019 across web, social and mobile platforms. King was acquired by Activision Blizzard Inc. (Nasdaq ATVI) in February 2016 and operates as an independent unit of the company.

Our passion

Making great games is incredibly challenging but we’ve proven it can be done… and we see a world of possibilities ahead. We’re challenging ourselves to dream bigger in a Seriously Playful way. We’re experimenting, learning, and adapting continuously to shape the industry in ways yet to be imagined.

We’re passionate about bringing moments of magic to our players and we’re not afraid to have fun along the way. Above all, we play as a team, helping each other have impact on a massive scale. And we’ll know we’ve outdone ourselves when we’ve inspired the world to play.

If you share our passion, our values, and our hunger to shape the future, join us in Making the World Playful!

Together, we’ll create new experiences that raise the bar, delight billions of people, and redefine the world of games again and again.

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