Delivery Director - 12 Month FTC

Are you an experienced leader in the transformation, development & execution of operational strategy for technical teams who wants to deliver customer, player and business value at Jagex?

As the Delivery Director in our Core Tech team, you will work closely with senior leadership to transform the delivery capability with technology teams and games production teams across the studio. You’ll work with Delivery Partners, Team Managers and Studio Leadership to provide forecasts for deliveries, driving continuous improvement, and providing Leadership with a clear and concise understanding of how the department is tracking to its goals.

This is a hugely influential role within the studio, in which you will guide the strategic direction of production for our Core Tech team, ensuring development of and alignment to studio-wide production best practice.

What you’ll be doing:

• Developing and executing the operational strategy of our Core Tech team. 
• Create the work systems used throughout the business unit, including how teams are structured, whether and how they report status back to the business unit, and how multi-teamwork is coordinated.
• Develop accountability rituals wherein teams plan and review their commitments/delivery and hold each other accountable for them, celebrate successes, and learn from failures.
• Develop systems to ensure problems with delivery are regularly and quickly diagnosed and addressed.
• Ensure internal stakeholders and customers are always up to date on what's going on in terms of what commitments have been made and how the delivery is going.
• Understand the capabilities of Core Tech and how these match to its strategies in order to plan for current work and future needs.
• Drive Core Tech leadership discussion around how to grow (headcount / vendor projections, hiring) and then allocate the workforce accordingly.
• Ensure that conflicts within and between Core Tech are resolved effectively.
• Ensure psychological safety, healthy feedback culture and conflict management within and between Core Tech teams and the wider Jagex Group.
• Work with Core Tech leadership to foster and enable an environment where teams are empowered, and autonomy is normalised.
• Work closely with the Senior Director of Production, Production Leadership and other Production personnel to improve delivery at Jagex based on cutting edge practices and techniques from Lean, Agile and Systems Thinking.
• Establish production KPIs for Core Tech in-line with studio-wide best practice; monitor, improve and report on them to Core Tech and senior leadership.
• Be able to operate in a delivery context (hands on) as well as enacting transformative change and strategic leadership (for production) at Core Tech Leadership level.
• Be accountable for correct allocation of operational expenditure and reporting purposes for the department P&L.
• Line manage Delivery Leads aligned to Core Tech (i.e. pastoral care, career development, performance management) while coaching and mentoring more junior production personnel to enhance their capability and the overall production capability of Jagex.

What we’re looking for:

• An active interest in the games industry and the technology behind it. This role should be product focused at all levels.
• Extensive experience of hands-on delivery utilising Agile, Lean and / or Systems Thinking.  
• Extensive experience managing/facilitating complex deliveries involving 3 or more teams.
• Proven & demonstrable Software-Development Lifecycle experience.
• Proven ability to influence senior stakeholders to achieve the best outcome for Jagex and the Core Tech team.
• Demonstrable experience successfully collaborating with Product, UX, QA & Engineering in multi-functional teams & across the leadership of these functions.
• Experience of working in a scaled delivery environment.
• Recent experience of working effectively with distributed teams.
• A proven track record of being value driven rather than project metrics driven (outcome over output).
• Open to some infrequent international travel when required.

Collaboration is at the heart of Jagex. We love getting together with our teams to share ideas and socialise. If you live in the UK, we offer a flexible working model that empowers you to work in the way that suits you best, while also getting the best from your working relationship with all the great people you’ll be connecting with here. We support you to be set up for success no matter where in the UK you log in.

Flexibility really is the key to how we set up working schedules, we’ll discuss your needs with you and be transparent about the working schedules of the team you’ll be working with during our interview process.

About Jagex:

Make forever games with us.

Jagex is a thriving international games company with a growing library of forever game IPs for core gamers. We have such huge expertise at running games for the long term that we re-define expectations for what evergreen success looks like.

We create spaces for our players to come together – with each other and with us – inside and outside of our games. We empower our players with real influence on the game’s evolution. We help our players belong. Our community experiences give players a greater stake in what they’re playing, creating loyal forever fans.

These strengths inform our vision of our studio as a thriving international games company with a growing library of forever game IPs for core gamers. Our forever games will nurture sizable communities whose loyalty provides consistent revenues.

This in turn drives our mission: We create forever fans by empowering our community. We give players experiences worthy of their long-term time investment and actively collaborate with them to shape the games and the community for the better.

If this is something you want to be a part of, get in touch.

We have 500 of the industry’s most talented individuals in our Cambridge studio; if you share our values and ambition, we’d love to talk to you. Worried you don’t meet all the requirements in the spec? Your attitude, fresh perspective and experience is just as important to us; if you think this could be the perfect job for you, let’s talk.