Senior Principal UX Designer (6 month FTC)

Craft:

Job Description:

We’re looking for a Senior Principal UX Designer to help transform the developer experience at King. This is a 6 month fixed-term maternity cover.

You’ll work with our Build & Infrastructure teams as we reset King’s continuous integration (CI) orchestration. We’re modernising the foundations of our CI ecosystem while addressing years of accumulated complexity across its workflows.
This is more than a technology transformation. It’s an opportunity to understand what our game teams need from CI, simplify critical workflows and create a developer ecosystem that helps teams build and deliver great games effectively.
You’ll bring deep user research expertise and senior design leadership to the programme. Initially, you’ll lead a summative study of our current CI workflows, helping the team understand users’ pain points, behaviours and unmet needs. You’ll identify the outcomes and jobs to be done that should shape the future CI experience.
You’ll then work closely with engineers, product partners and King’s game teams to translate those insights into clear, efficient CI workflows and coherent end-to-end journeys across our developer ecosystem.
This role belongs to part of the Kingdom we call Shared Tech. The teams within Shared Tech work across all the technology that we use to power our live games, including data infrastructure, machine learning, payments infrastructure and the game engine itself.

• Define and lead research into King’s existing CI workflows, using appropriate qualitative and quantitative methods.
• Identify pain points, workarounds and unmet needs, translating your findings into prioritised outcomes and clearly articulated user stories, jobs to be done, or similar.
• Map current and future developer journeys across CI and the wider developer ecosystem.
• Work with engineers and game teams to design, prototype and evaluate intuitive, efficient CI workflows.
• Facilitate workshops that build shared understanding, explore solutions and align teams around priorities.
• Communicate complex systems and design decisions clearly, influencing initiative direction through evidence, systems thinking and constructive challenge.
• Help establish sustainable practices for continuing to learn from users as our CI ecosystem evolves.

Must have

• Extensive experience as a senior UX, product or service designer, with a track record of leading complex, high-impact work through expertise and influence.
• Deep user research expertise, including planning and leading substantial studies and turning findings into product direction and practical design decisions.
• Strong interaction and workflow design skills, particularly for complex tools, systems or end-to-end user journeys.
• Experience applying jobs-to-be-done or comparable outcome-led frameworks.
• Confidence working closely with engineers and engaging with technical subject matter.
• Excellent facilitation, communication and stakeholder-management skills, with the ability to create alignment around competing needs and constraints.
• The ability to work independently, bring structure to ambiguity and balance user needs with technical and delivery considerations.

Particularly valuable

• Experience designing developer tools, internal platforms or other products for technical users.
• Familiarity with continuous integration and delivery, build systems or software-development workflows.
• Experience with Jenkins, Buildkite or comparable CI/CD platforms.
• Experience simplifying legacy systems or supporting large-scale platform transformations.
• Knowledge of service design or systems thinking, particularly when working across interconnected tools, workflows and teams.
• Experience working in a large-scale engineering or game-development organisation.

Direct experience with Jenkins or Buildkite is not essential. You will, however, need the curiosity and confidence to develop a strong understanding of technical workflows and earn the trust of experienced engineers and developers.

What success looks like
In this role, you will help King develop:

• A robust, evidence-based understanding of how game teams experience CI today.
• Clear priorities based on the outcomes users need to achieve, not simply the features of the existing system.
• Simpler, smoother and more coherent CI workflows.
• End-to-end developer journeys that work well across the wider King ecosystem.
• Strong collaboration between Build & Infrastructure teams and the game teams they support.
• A sustainable foundation for continuing to improve the CI experience.

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.