Development Director, Live Ops

Job Description

Development Director, Live Ops (Content) - Sledgehammer Games

Located in the San Francisco Bay Area, Melbourne, Australia, Toronto, Canada and Guildford, UK – Sledgehammer Games is the videogame development team behind Call of Duty®: Modern Warfare 3, Call of Duty®: Advanced Warfare, Call of Duty®: WWII, and Call of Duty®: Vanguard. Since our founding in 2009, our greatest passion has been making AAA games. The strength of our team makes us not only excellent at what we do, but also how we do it. We firmly believe in supporting our hardworking employees to be the best they can be. Here at Sledgehammer Games, everyone is a game maker.

We are constantly evolving and innovating – which are some of the most rewarding aspects of game development. With our outstanding audio, design, engineering, and art teams, we've been able to achieve some of the highest-quality game execution of any studio in the industry. We love making games and we work hard to make sure that each new game we make is even better than the last. Creativity is key, and we're looking for dedicated game developers for our exciting upcoming projects.

Your Mission

As a Development Director you will drive to quality targets, own schedules and oversee various pipelines for your teams. This is achieved by working closely with various departments to identify needs, utilize resources efficiently, and consistently aligning your backlogs against top level organizational goals. The role of Development Director requires candidates to be excellent and persuasive communicators, capable of dealing with a wide variety of internal and external partners across company leadership levels. The ideal candidate will be comfortable with all degrees of ownership, from personally managing projects to top level tasking & assessing through other managing Producers. Development Director candidates must thrive in ambiguous environments and be adept at driving quality in line with team, schedule, budget and organizational goals.

Priorities can often change in a fast-paced environment like ours, so this role includes, but is not limited to, the following responsibilities:
• Leading the execution of the game development process to produce high quality live operations content through the framework of Call of Duty
• Working with various development teams to define and meet critical live ops / project deadlines
• Accountable for defining the standard used to create and maintain project plans across multiple content focused development teams
• Driving content team resourcing against needs to meet business goals, production schedules and organizational budgets
• Proactively identifying improvement areas and recommending+implementing new processes where efficiencies are needed to improve efficiencies / predictability
• Ensuring all necessary project documentation & data views are standardized, complete and regularly maintained
• Establishing and maintaining a productive, inclusive and communicativement team environment
• Identifying and resolving conflicts between schedule, budget, priorities and business goals
• Direct managing multiple direct reports, across levels/functions, through developing and achieving their individual / professional goals on a yearly basis

Player Profile

Minimum Requirements:
• At least 7+ years experience in the interactive entertainment industry in a Production leadership role with a focus on Live Operations
• Experience leading both internal and external development teams, across international time zones
• Senior+ Production experience of the entire life-cycle of video-game software development (concept to post launch) of multiple published titles on console/pc/mobile with an emphasis on developing & driving content creation teams for the focus of live operations
• Ability to diagnose reasons for content development inefficiencies and drive solutioning across key stakeholders to improve said inefficiencies through process, tooling or organizational restructuring
• Ability to foresee risks, drive the development of their mitigation strategies, and communicate the top level assessment to all required stakeholder groups
• Excellent written and oral communication skills
• Cross functional management experience including: employee selection, employee development (including OKRs), performance management, conflict resolution, team facilitation, budgeting, and project planning
• Extensive experience working with content teams through full life cycle content development, starting from early ideation to release
• Demonstrated experience with project management software, including project life-cycle models (including reporting), risk assessments, and team management
• Proven ability to thrive while working in the unpredictable and rapid development nature of live operations
• Expert experience with development planning tools (ie: Jira, Confluence, Microsoft Suite, etc.)
• Expert understanding of fundamental Production principles (ie: SCRUM, Waterfall, Agile), including their strengths, weaknesses and ideal application scenarios

Extra Points:
• Bachelors' degree in computer science, engineering, game design/production or related technical field
• Interest in the First Person Shooter genre of games, particularly ones that operate on a GaaS model
• Deep understanding of current industry trends, best practices and key innovations

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Jobcode: Reference SBJ-gx8qnj-18-191-174-168-42 in your application.