Development Director

Job Description

Report to Studio Director of EA Create Shanghai.

The Create studio is looking for a skilled, energetic and fun loving individual to join our leadership team and help create EA's next big AAA title. EA Create is a center for distributed development across EA's game studios where we get to work on popular franchises such as Battlefield, Need for Speed, Plants vs. Zombies, EA Sports, Command and Conquer and many more. We strive to provide game studio partners with high quality art production solutions while focusing on refining and expanding our studio capabilities.

Similar to producer or project manager, a development director is in charge of making sure your team delivers their work on time and to quality. You will be the main communication conduit to the game teams in understanding project requirements, coordinating project resources, managing development schedules, identifying and resolving risks and most importantly, executing to plan.

This role will be based in Shanghai and we are willing to relocate the right candidate. If you are looking for an adventure in the wild wild East, Shanghai is the place for you! Our office is located minutes away from the heart of downtown Shanghai where the city's full range of culinary delights, culture sites and amazing nightlife awaits you.
Our leadership team is composed of experienced game developers from all over the world. We are an international group and we aim to create a fun work culture and environment worthy of a top notch global game company. We actively promote staff-driven culture initiatives such as photography club, bike riding club, poker nights, table top games, monthly happy hour etc. as a way to improve inter-studio communication and relationships between project teams.

Responsibilities Include
• Responsible for creating and validating a project schedule that meets the requirements of the game team; discuss and create consensus on project resource requirements, workflow and milestones; establish WGLL (What Good Looks Like), identify key stakeholders for regular communications and check-ins;
• Prioritize tasks to minimize bottlenecks while ensuring the production pipeline matches with the needs of the game studios;
• Identify project risks through regular monitoring of production status, team morale and communication channels; call out project risks and create mitigation plans before they become an issue;
• Managing through change request process by clearly communicating to project stakeholders the nature of the change request, the cost of changes and the prioritization of the changes;
• Provide leadership and mentorship to team members through regular 1:1s and weekly team meetings;
• Identify and mitigate attrition risks;
• Reward and recognize top performers through quarterly team performance review, promotions and salary adjustments while identifying and assisting low performers in improving their capabilities;
• Discuss and provide career path for team members, identify training courses and seek opportunities to assign team members challenging assignments to continuously improve their skills;

Qualifications
• 10+ years total of game development experience with 4 years in project management and 3 years in managing a development team;
• Strong communication skills across all levels of an organization including negotiation, mediation and conflict resolution;
• PMP Certification an asset;
• Fluent in English and Mandarin;
• Experience in managing an Asian team is a big plus;
• Experience in distributed development is a big plus;

Jobcode: Reference SBJ-g3302x-3-15-3-154-42 in your application.