Studio Design Director, Game Studio

Netflix is one of the world's leading entertainment services, with 283 million paid memberships in over 190 countries enjoying TV series, films and games across a wide variety of genres and languages. Members can play, pause and resume watching as much as they want, anytime, anywhere, and can change their plans at any time.

About Night School Studio: We’re a group of developers, artists, and storytellers that make games full of wonder, danger, and humor. Everyone at our studio, whether an industry vet or new voice impacts each game through collaborative feedback, mutual respect, and creative empowerment. If you want to make games leave a meaningful impact on players: we want to hear from you.

We’re looking for new teammates who deeply care about the work they do, the stories they tell, and the people they create with. As part of the Netflix team, we strive to hire the best and value integrity, excellence, respect, inclusion, and collaboration.

Design at Night School: Designers and Game Directors invent new ways to play with interactive stories. Our studio’s goal is to create world-class narrative games. The building blocks of our games are the storytelling mechanics – design leadership defines what they are, and how they all fit together.

Role Overview: We’re looking for a strong leader to help us forge Night School’s upcoming design vision, and manage our design team. As Studio Design Director, you will manage, mentor and inspire a team of Designers and Game Directors, drive macro and micro game design vision, and collaborate with world class storytellers, artists, and developers to let audiences interact with narrative in brand new ways.

You will oversee the vision and experiential direction for multiple games from the concept phase, through production, launch, and beyond. The right candidate will bring industry-leading craft expertise and attention to detail to generate the design vision for games that are high quality, emotionally resonant and iconic. 

Responsibilities:

• Hire, manage, and mentor a team of Designers and Game Directors to do their best work, fulfilling the creative and business objectives of each project 

• Develop, champion, improve and iterate on the core design vision for our studio's narrative games with your team of talented Designers and Game Directors

• Oversee and be accountable for your team’s development of core game features from initial concept, through spec and prototype, to full implementation, along with your team

• Collaborate with studio leadership (Art, Writing, Audio, Editorial, PD) to develop structure, plans, and process to realize the vision for the game

• Deeply understanding, and then synthesizing all the unique advantages and opportunities that will be provided by the Netflix ecosystem and Games platform into a cohesive vision for massively successful games

• Focus your team on rapid prototyping to quickly iterate to "find the fun", and make bold decisions to move the team forward

• Collaborate with teammates by providing and receiving creative/team feedback, improving others’ creative contributions, and providing clear creative goals

• Identify opportunities for improvement of process, and develop plans for targeted outsourcing of Design work not being handled in-house

Skills and Experience

• At least 10 years of game design experience, including experience as a Design Director, Creative Director or comparable design leadership role

• Exceptional people leadership skills

• Can balance innovation with what is tried and true to develop a game that can appeal to 10’s or 100’s of millions of players around the world 

• Proven track record of delivering clear and consistent creative and managerial feedback that elevates other team members’ work 

About You:

• Loves overseeing a team of Designers and Directors, coaching and empowering them to be better in their discipline

• Not afraid to make tough decisions

• Passionate about the intersection of player agency and immersive, broadly appealing storytelling

• Thrives as a member of a cross-functional multidisciplinary team

• Communicates with authenticity, intention, and curiosity

• Gets excited by learning new skills, dashing to pitch in, even if this means flexing beyond this role’s core responsibilities if it can help us win

Generally, our compensation structure consists solely of an annual salary; we do not have bonuses. You choose each year how much of your compensation you want in salary versus stock options. To determine your personal top of market compensation, we rely on market indicators and consider your specific job family, background, skills, and experience to determine your compensation in the market range. The range for this role is $210,000 - $320,000.

Netflix provides comprehensive benefits including Health Plans, Mental Health support, a 401(k) Retirement Plan with employer match, Stock Option Program, Disability Programs, Health Savings and Flexible Spending Accounts, Family-forming benefits, and Life and Serious Injury Benefits. We also offer paid leave of absence programs.  Full-time hourly employees accrue 35 days annually for paid time off to be used for vacation, holidays, and sick paid time off. Full-time salaried employees are immediately entitled to flexible time off. See more detail about our Benefits here.

Netflix has a unique culture and environment. Learn more here.

Inclusion is a Netflix value and we strive to host a meaningful interview experience for all candidates. If you want an accommodation/adjustment for a disability or any other reason during the hiring process, please send a request to your recruiting partner.

We are an equal-opportunity employer and celebrate diversity, recognizing that diversity builds stronger teams. We approach diversity and inclusion seriously and thoughtfully. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, ancestry, national origin, caste, sex, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity or expression, age, disability, medical condition, pregnancy, genetic makeup, marital status, or military service.