Craft:
Data, Analytics & StrategyJob Description:
We are looking for a Senior Data Scientist to work closely with product, game design, and engineering on game difficulty, progression, and economy in Candy Crush Saga. You will help ensure that our 23,000+ levels and game features combine into a balanced, engaging, and evolving player experience.
This is a role close to the game itself: your analyses, experiments, and models will directly shape gameplay decisions that reach millions of players. You will have significant ownership of your problem space and be a trusted analytical voice in product and design discussions.
Your role within the Kingdom
- Analyze game difficulty, progression, and player behavior across the level catalog to identify friction, pacing issues, and opportunities
- Design, monitor, and analyze A/B tests related to difficulty, features, and economy
- Use data, models, and simulations to inform difficulty tuning, balance, and how features, boosters, and economy mechanics interact with player outcomes
- Bring a strong analytical perspective to product and design discussions, helping shape priorities and trade-offs
- Communicate insights, experiment results, and recommendations clearly to stakeholders with varying levels of data literacy
- Define tracking specifications so the data needed to understand player interaction with levels and features is available and reliable, and build your own data models and dashboards where needed
Product & Player Understanding
- Strong product sense with the ability to reason about player experience, engagement, and frustration
- Ability to translate design intent and game experience into measurable hypotheses and analyses
Analytics & Experimentation
- Strong analytical coding skills in Python or R
- Excellent SQL skills and experience working with large-scale player data
- Solid understanding of A/B testing, experimental design, and statistical inference
- Experience combining experimental results with observational analysis
- Comfortable defining tracking requirements and building data models and dashboards to support your own analyses
Modeling & Problem Solving
- Ability to systematically break down complex game systems into solvable analytical problems
- Experience with simulation, optimization, or algorithmic approaches is a strong plus
Communication & Collaboration
- Ability to influence decisions through clear storytelling, visualization, and data-driven reasoning
- Comfortable working iteratively and cross-functionally with product managers, game designers, and engineers
- Experience with game difficulty balancing, progression systems, or virtual economies
- Background in behavioral psychology, economics, or game theory
- Experience in the games industry or other large-scale consumer products
- Familiarity with large-scale experimentation platforms and live-operated products
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.
Skills Required
- Strong analytical coding skills in Python or R
- Excellent SQL skills and experience working with large-scale player data
- Strong product sense and ability to reason about player experience, engagement, and frustration
- Ability to translate game design intent and player experience into measurable hypotheses and analyses
- Solid understanding of A/B testing, experimental design, and statistical inference
- Experience combining experimental results with observational analysis
- Experience defining tracking requirements and building data models and dashboards
- Ability to break down complex game systems into solvable analytical problems
- Ability to influence decisions through clear storytelling, visualization, and data-driven reasoning
- Ability to work cross-functionally with product managers, game designers, and engineers
- Experience with simulation, optimization, or algorithmic approaches
- Experience with game difficulty balancing, progression systems, or virtual economies
- Background in behavioral psychology, economics, or game theory
- Experience in the games industry or other large-scale consumer products
- Familiarity with large-scale experimentation platforms and live-operated products
King Compensation & Benefits Highlights
The following summarizes recurring compensation and benefits themes identified from responses generated by popular LLMs to common candidate questions about King and has not been reviewed or approved by King.
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Leave & Time Off Breadth — Paid vacation, floating holidays, sick time, a winter holiday break, and substantial paid leaves for life events are part of the package. Offerings are localized by country while maintaining generous time-away support.
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Healthcare Strength — Multiple medical plan options, preventive care coverage, company HSA/HRA contributions, and mental‑health resources are highlighted. Access is tailored to local systems and includes fitness program options.
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Parental & Family Support — Enhanced leave for all parents and family‑building support such as adoption and surrogacy reimbursement are emphasized. Additional paid compassion and bereavement leaves extend support for caregiving needs.
King Insights
What We Do
King is a leading interactive entertainment company in the mobile world. We create unforgettable games that are played around the world every single day, like Candy Crush, our sweet phenomenon. King is an independent unit of Activision Blizzard Inc. which acquired King in February 2016.
