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Design Director - Diner DASH Adventures

GluPlay is a Glu Mobile studio and now part of the Electronic Arts family. The combination of our talented teams at Glu and EA position us as a leader in the largest gaming category in the world. We are forming a powerful growth engine that will expand our current games and deliver more amazing new experiences across sports, lifestyle, mid-core, and casual for players everywhere. Come join us!

At GluPlay, we believe you can have fun anywhere, anytime and at any age. That’s why we’re committed to creating mobile games for everyone to enjoy, including the fan-favorite DASH® games like Diner Dash®, Cooking Dash®, Restaurant Dash™ and Diner Dash Adventures®! Whether you’re in line at the store, on your lunch break or lounging at home, you only need a minute to dive into any one of our games—yet you’ll find a lifetime of entertainment. Our games are played by tens of millions of fans worldwide, and we’re just getting started.

You’ll find that as a team, we’re extremely close knit and are highly proud of our hard at work, hard at play culture with a heavy emphasis on making sure you have plenty of work-life balance and family time.

We are looking for a Design Directorwho can integrate themselves into our Studio Leadership team as we guide our Product and Studio to a successful future. You will also have a passion for leading and mentoring a small team of Game and User Interface Designers as they work with User Research and PM Teams to provide the highest quality experience for our fans. You are familiar with all the top mobile titles, and bring that wealth of knowledge to bear on content creation, with a deep understanding of the casual player. The ideal candidate is both creatively and strategically minded, able to make innovative use of game systems in order to craft fun and polished challenges.

You'll most often:

• Provide clear and concise communication of the product vision, design approaches and requirements to team members, product owners, senior management and other relevant key partners through documentation, presentations and visual tools to convey key concepts, mechanics and systems required.
• Drive the design of Diner Dash Adventures by bringing creativity, vision, market knowledge, design experience, innovation and a collaborative working style to become a key design leader on the team.
• Develop systems and behaviors for improving core gameplay, retention, and social game features that monetize, engage and motivate players through amazing game experiences and highly enjoyable progression.
• Ability to understand and assume ownership of freemium game economy to maximize the player experience and revenue potential.
• Observe and analyze user testing and analytics to recommend design solutions and improve/fix design features during the life of the product as a service.
• Establish and model key player progression and game economy statements, balance the game towards them.
• Ability to spearhead UXR testing and translating results into actionable design documentation
• Reinforce a metrics-driven approach to game design, learning from user data to ensure excellent retention, monetization, and meaningful social connections in the game design.
• Lead design reviews/evaluations on a regular basis. Respond to emergent QA and design issues/problems in development and ensure these are addressed to meet product goals and release plan targets
• Help craft a vision for Live Ops that stretches out months at a time with a clear understanding of impact on retention/monetization, working closely with a Project Manager/Lead to effectively push them into content releases that drive value.

You'll be a great fit for this role if you have:

• 6+ years of free-to-play game design experience on mobile platforms or the web.
• Experience mentoring others, and ideally experience with multiple product life cycles
• Extensive experience with teardowns
• Experience with difficulty curves and econ tuning
• Excellent analytical, facilitation and organizational skills required
• Experience working with user interface and user experience design required
• Demonstrated ability to be self-motivated
• Demonstrated ability to work well in an agile manner with Product Managers, Artists, Producers, and Engineers to efficiently deliver excellent games while working within requirements and constraints of technology, schedule and budget
• Ability to rapidly generate and refine extremely fun game mechanics with compelling and relatable themes
• Strong experience at maintaining game data in spreadsheets
• Commitment to quality on time execution and team collaboration
• Strong written and verbal English communication skills essential

At Electronic Arts, we exist to Inspire the World to Play. We cr ea te extraordinary new game experiences for our millions of players everywhere by bringing together talented people that combine cr ea tivity, innovation, and passion. We know that our strength lies in the diversity of our people. We immerse our employees into an inclusive culture, and provide opportunities for l ea rning and l ea ding that allow them to do the most impactful and rewarding work of their careers.

We put our people first. We provide comprehensive benefit packages with a focus on h ea lth and wellbeing to support your needs and help you balance your career and personal life. We provide access to dynamic and collaborative work environments, opportunities to connect and contribute through our Employee Resource Groups, and support for a balanced life with paid time off and maternity and paternity l ea ve, plus free video games and so much more!

Electronic Arts is an equal opportunity employer. All employment decisions are made without regard to race, color, national origin, ancestry, sex, gender, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, age, genetic information, religion, disability, medical condition, pregnancy, marital status, family status, veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by law. Electronic Arts also makes workplace accommodations for qualified individuals with disabilities as required by applicable law.