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Senior Game Designer - (North America)

Gram Games is the studio behind some of the most popular mobile titles like 1010!, Six! and Merge Dragons!. We’ve recently released Merge Magic! and we have more awesome projects in the pipeline. We do things differently here: we work in small self-managing teams, enabling you to have an incredible amount of ownership, autonomy and impact. We'll never ask you to abandon your craft and just focus on managing others or workload.

At Gram everyone is expected to have a razor-sharp focus on what creates tangible impact: impact on their team, impact on their work environment and impact on the overall company strategy. If you are motivated by autonomy, constant improvement, collaboration and the sense of belonging, this is the right job for you.

As a Senior Game Designer at Gram Games, you’ll work with an A+ mobile team to help grow and develop live titles, with the objective of growing it from a hit to an evergreen mega-hit. You will work with other designers on the project to learn the ins-and-outs of the game’s systems, economy, level and content design, core philosophies, and more. You will use your wealth of design knowledge, your extensive experience, and your analytical thinking and insights to craft exciting new features and engaging content that will position the game for greater success.

You will also engage with the player community to understand their desires and how they play, to better inform your decisions. You will be a part of the overall design pipeline -- providing feedback and insight to designers, artists, and producers on proposed designs as well as live designs that need revisiting. You’ll be here to bring us together, to take advantage of each of our dynamic skills, and to turn them into games enjoyed and praised around the world.

Key Roles & Responsibilities

What will I do day to day?

• You will understand the game inside and out in order to be an effective designer on it. You should love it and constantly seek to understand and improve its inner workings
• Build engaging and exciting features that fit well with the core, and that seek to raise engagement and/or monetization
• Collaborate with creative leadership product managers to build well-crafted economies and economic loops
• Develop compelling metagame loops and progression models that retain players over the long-term
• Help or guide the team in developing a longer-term road-map for the game to guide content and feature development based on production needs and constraints
• Adapt and optimize designs based on data on player behavior
• Work closely with the other designers, as well as production, art, engineering, analytics, QA, and marketing when needed. Constantly seek feedback and provide feedback. Collaborate not just with you team members, but across the studio as well

Requirements

• Extensive experience in designing complex systems, comprehensive tuning and balancing knowledge, and strong mathematical skillset
• 3+ years of proven success in design focused on systems
• A university degree in game design, mathematics, or similar fields
• At least one mobile freemium game launched
• A deep, demonstrable level of experience as a Game Designer with a proven track record of designing features and systems with significant KPI impact
• Balanced and managed the metagame or economy for successful, live F2P games
• Experience with level / puzzle design incl. Wire-framing, prototyping, flow-diagrams
• Experience of being a leader in a team: coaching, mentoring, guiding discussions in a pragmatic and friendly way
• Working knowledge of game production pipelines, Unity or similar game engine(s), task-management programs, spreadsheeting.

Benefits

• Competitive salary, bonus plan, Zynga RSU’s (Restricted Stock Units), ESPP (Employee Stock Purchase Plan)
• RRSP Company Match Contribution
• Extended Health coverage, dental, disability, critical illness, EAP, and life insurance
• Virtual mental health and neurodiversity support programs
• Goodlife fitness annual membership
• Open vacation policy
• Family planning support program
• Generous paid maternity/parental leave
• Subsidized Back-up child care
• Zynga happy hours and frequent employee events
• Casual dress every single day
• Culture of diversity and inclusion including employee resource groups
• Work with cool people and impact millions of daily players