Associate Tech Director (ML - Levels)

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Job Description:

Role Overview

As Associate Tech Director, ML – Levels, you will act as the technical owner and architect for machine learning infrastructure and capabilities that support level-related systems across King’s games. Operating within the Shared Tech organization, your mission is to enable scalable, production-ready ML systems that empower game teams to deliver smarter, faster, and more balanced level experiences.

Your Mission
 

ML Infrastructure & Systems Design

• Design, implement, and maintain the ML platform and tooling that powers level-related applications — such as automated playtesting,  level validation, and content generation workflows.
• Build robust, scalable, and observable ML pipelines for training, evaluation, deployment, and monitoring.

Technical Alignment with Games

• Serve as the ML infrastructure partner for game teams working on levels, ensuring that platform capabilities meet their evolving needs in speed, scale, and flexibility.
• Translate complex requirements from designers, data scientists, and engineers into technical solutions that are broadly usable across titles.
• Act as a bridge between Shared Tech and game teams to align technical architecture and promote reuse of shared capabilities.

Execution + Vision

• Work hands-on with infrastructure (Python, Airflow, Kubernetes, GCP, etc.) to prototype and productionize ML capabilities.
• Champion engineering best practices for reliability, observability, CI/CD, versioning, and testing across ML workflows.
• Inform strategic technical decisions by staying up to date with developments in ML tooling, deployment frameworks, and DevOps for ML.

What You Bring

• Proven (8+ years) of experience in software engineering and ML systems, with a focus on ML Ops, infrastructure, or platform engineering.
• Deep knowledge of ML development lifecycles and tooling: model packaging, reproducibility, A/B testing frameworks, and real-time/near-real-time deployment.
• Proficient in Python with production-grade software development habits; strong knowledge of data orchestration (Airflow, Kubeflow, or equivalent).
• Experience with cloud-native ML stacks (preferably GCP) and distributed data processing (e.g. BigQuery, Dataflow, Spark).
• Strong cross-functional skills — you’re able to work across technical and product teams and guide ML platform decisions that balance flexibility, scale, and speed.

Nice to Have

• Experience working in shared services or platform roles supporting multiple product teams.
• Exposure to level design or game content systems, even indirectly, is a plus.
• Familiarity with simulation, generative models, or reinforcement learning workflows (from an infra perspective).
• You love building tools that unblock others and make ML experimentation more scalable and fun.

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.