Design Director

The ability to create experiences is magical… but everyone should be able to do it! We have the ambition to realize this dream by creating exciting games, communities, and building empowering technologies and tools. If you are passionate about our mission, bring your expertise, enthusiasm and ridiculous ideas. Everyone at Embark contributes as game makers and culture creators. Your willingness to strive for the unexpected, to succeed, fail, learn, and enjoy it, is essential to our success.



Overview

As Design Director, your focus is on enabling the design team to consistently perform at their best by providing clear, precise direction with enough guided wiggle room to maximize autonomy and creativity, leading to a cohesive and elegant player experience. You empower designers to perform and surprise, ensuring our design culture is based around trust, innovation, iteration, learning, collaboration and sharing.

As a manager, you inspire, guide and mentor a team of designers, nurturing a work environment where they can thrive and grow both individually and as a team. We believe that you’re an excellent collaborator with many years of experience working with multiple game crafts, and have a deep understanding of the specific challenges each craft strives to meet. This makes you a pragmatic designer that can evaluate, adapt, compromise, and positively work towards solving problems across multiple axis. In addition to working on a project, you’re also an evangelist for game design across the company with an ambition to improve the design culture, process and thinking among all of our game makers.

Examples of responsibilities

- Nurture and communicate the design direction to ensure the launch of an incredible game experience that can be expanded and iterated on together with the player community
- Inspire, mentor and manage a team consisting of game, narrative, technical, world and UX designers
- Plan, prioritize and set goals together with the team to facilitate an iterative and creative process where we evaluate progress on a daily basis through playtests
- Actively strive to improve and evolve our design culture within the company, helping ensure Embark is the best possible environment for creative talent


We would love if you have

- A creative and curious mind
- 10+ years of creative work across multiple types of games and at least 5+ years managing and directing a design team
- Experience launching and operating AAA live service and/or free-to-play games
- You’ve shipped multiple titles from inception to launch in a design role
- A strong work ethic and a passion for drawing out and driving creativity and innovation
- Ability to overcome truly unique design challenges
- Ability to respond positively and calmly to shifting priorities, demands and timelines
- Able to adapt to varied learning and communication styles of team members and others
- Advocacy for the player's experience and their creative involvement