Engineering Manager | Candy Crush Saga

Craft:

Job Description:

Engineering Manager – Challenge & Economy, Candy Crush Saga
King operates mobile games at a massive scale. With titles like Candy Crush, Bubble Witch and Farm Heroes, our technology powers joyful moments for hundreds of millions of players every day.
The Challenge & Economy Product Group builds the systems behind Candy Crush Saga's economy and rewards, and the challenge features that give players fresh reasons to come back every day. What we ship is felt by millions of people within days, and the data comes back just as fast.
Your Role Within Our Kingdom
Our teams are cross-functional, with Engineering, QA, Product, Production, Creative and Data working closely together. Each team is led by a trio of Engineering Manager, Product Manager and Producer, and the quality of that partnership shapes how well the team performs.
As Engineering Manager you'll lead one of these teams, distributed across King's European offices including Stockholm and London. This is a highly present role: you'll be in the team's rituals, technical discussions and day-to-day decisions, not observing from a distance. You'll coach Engineers individually and as a group, strengthen the team's culture, make sure the work lands with the quality and pace the game demands, and represent Engineering in the wider leadership of the Product Group.
You Will, Among Other Things…

• Hire, coach and develop a team of Engineers and QA, with clear expectations, regular feedback and well-run growth conversations
• Be an active member of the team: running and supporting its rituals, joining technical discussions, and helping it make good decisions quickly
• Own the quality, predictability and timeliness of your team's deliveries, and champion engineering standards including responsible use of AI-assisted engineering
• Lead alongside your Product Manager and Producer in the team's trio, shaping prioritisation and roadmap together and bringing Engineering and QA perspectives into planning and decision-making
• Represent Engineering in Product Group (Challenge & Economy) and Domain (Player Value) leadership forums, and partner with Senior and Principal Engineers to keep technical and product strategy aligned
• Surface cross-team risks and dependencies early, and help make ownership explicit where it's unclear

Skills to Create Thrills

• You get your energy from developing people and teams, not just products, and you've built a strong Engineering culture before
• You've led Engineers as a manager, ideally having been a senior individual contributor yourself, and you're comfortable adding value in technical conversations without needing to be the deepest expert in the room
• You have strong stakeholder skills and partner effectively with Product, Production and other functions to align on priorities and trade-offs
• You have solid experience with live, large-scale consumer products and are comfortable with data-informed decision-making; games experience is a strong plus, not a requirement
• You hold a high bar for quality and pace, and can hold others to it constructively
• You've led or worked in distributed teams and communicate clearly across disciplines and levels, in writing as much as in conversation
• You use AI tools in your own work and are thoughtful about how a team adopts them well

Where You'll Be
Based in Stockholm, Sweden, at King's office in the city centre. We like working together in person and encourage regular time in the office, but we're not prescriptive about a set number of days; we trust you to find the balance that works for you and the team.
A Great Saga Needs All Sorts of Heroes
Making games is fun, especially with people who share the same idea of what makes a good workplace great. We design games for everyone, no matter where they are or who they are, and we employ all sorts of people from all kinds of backgrounds to bring them to life. We simply can't expect diversity in our players and originality in our games without first nurturing it in our people.
We're Seriously Playful
Officially, we're a leading interactive entertainment company for the mobile world. Unofficially, we're a serious business that's not afraid to have fun. Together with our parent company, our mission is to bring moments of magic to everyday life. If you think this is something you can help us achieve, let's talk.

About King

With a mission of Making the World Playful, King is a leading interactive entertainment company for the mobile world 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 titles such as Farm Heroes Saga. Around 200 million people play a King game every month. 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 and @lifeatking on Instagram.