Development Manager

Job Description

Development Manager (Contractor)

EA Create is a collective of content production teams partnering with EA Studios game teams to achieve outstanding visuals, audio and technology. Our teams comprise of artists, engineers, technicians, designers and development directors. Worldwide, we combine our teams to form a global group of extraordinary individuals fueled by imagination and a unified passion for creating amazing visuals, sound and experiences. We are a diverse team, creatively motivated through collaboration, culture and craft.

EA Create Shanghai is a center for distributed development across EA's game studios where we get to work on popular franchises such as Battlefield, Apex Legends, Need for Speed, Plants vs. Zombies, EA Sports and many more. We aim to provide game studio partners art production solutions while focusing on refining and expanding our studio capabilities.

Report to Studio Development Director

Responsibilities:

The Development Manager is in charge of making sure the team provides work on time and to quality. You will be the conduit to the game teams in understanding project requirements, coordinating project resources, managing development schedules, identifying risks and most importantly, accomplishing to plan.
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 promote staff-motivated culture projects such as photography club, studio parties, bike riding club, tabletop games, Friday happy hours. to improve relationships between project teams.
• Create and validate project schedules that meet the requirements of the game team; discuss and create agreement on project resource requirements, workflow and milestones; establish WGLL (What Good Looks Like), identify key stakeholders for regular communications and check-ins;
• 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;
• Manage through change request process by 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;
• Find and address 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 help provide career path for team members, identify training courses and seek opportunities to assign team members challenging assignments to improve their skills;

Qualifications:
• 2+ years of game development experience, 1+ years of hands on project management experience using Scrum/Agile methodology. PMP Certification an asset;
• Excellent process mindset documentation ability, previous process reengineering experience an added advantage;
• Solid Project Management software experience including but not excluding to: JIRA, Shotgun, MS Office Suite, SharePoint, Visio or other visualization and diagramming tools;
• Across all levels of an organization including negotiation, mediation and conflict resolution; Enjoy team setting and experience building working relationship with remote locations and global teams;
• People management experience with performance tracking and career development planning
• Fluent in English and Mandarin;
• Previous vendor management experience in distributed development is a big plus;
• Our global benefits package is not included for this role.

Jobcode: Reference SBJ-r1o7yv-18-188-175-182-42 in your application.