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Development Director I

Development Director - Maxis

Location: Redwood City, CA / Open to remote work for North America

Welcome to Maxis, home to tinkerers, craftspeople, & storytellers. Our drive is to inspire everyone to make a better world through creative play. As the developer of the Sims, we create games and experiences for millions of people around the world and are always looking for new ways to inspire our players. Maxis is a place where you can do what you love and help others grow while doing it; a place where your unique voice can be heard and seen. We put creativity and inclusivity at the core of our work and don’t settle for seeing the world only as it is but strive to build a world as it could be. Read on to see how you can join our team and dream big.

You will report into a studio Senior Development Director.

A Maxis Development Director helps drive our team through our milestones to deliver on features, implementations, and builds, all while being mindful of our scope and capacity, as well as our long-term deliverables. As a Development Director, you will partner with producers, craft directors and peers to ensure that the project is delivered to spec, on time, to quality, and within budget. The Development Director, will also manage members of the development team, helping them grow their careers and skills within the studio.

Responsibilities

• You will drive the delivery of features across your team:
  • Clearly communicate deliverables and scope and capacity to the team
  • Working on roadmap planning with craft leads, and aligning with team leadership to establish time and targets
  • Running sprint and milestone planning meetings
  • Proactive in identifying an escalating risks and concerns about targets for features and milestones
  • Create and help drive alignment around mitigation strategies to de-escalate risks.
• You will drive and support hiring for you team; helping define roles and responsibilities. Work with recruiting and internal studio manager, and participate in interviews to build your team.
• You will help drive and establish processes across our project management tools; planning, scope/capacity tracking, tool and plugin testing, and establishing best practices.
• You will help establish and drive Team Culture going forward; being a leader that embodies the values of the studio influencing how we create, develop, and work as a team.
• You will manage a team providing career growth, feedback, and reviews across a wide variety of disciplines.
• You will foster an engaging, fulfilling, trusting and fun working environment that is inclusive and diverse.

Qualifications

• Experience with JIRA and using it for agile and waterfall methodologies for task tracking.
• Able to define and maintain score and capacity for your organization and map out those details into deliverables for upcoming deadlines.
• Comfortable with a developing project and is able to self-direct and take ownership with the ability to drive and adapt processes to meet the needs of the project.
• Ability to drive and maintain the partnership with production and design to achieve consensus on priorities amidst the needs of the project and our deadlines.
• People management experience in career growth and skills development.