Associate Engineering Director for CRM

Craft:Technology & DevelopmentJob Description:The Associate Engineering Director for CRM & Marketing Technology for Marketing & Promotions leads and manages a critical team within King’s Player Experience Operations organization. This role is accountable for building, scaling, and maintaining systems that underpin King’s product marketing capabilities. These systems are foundational to King’s player-centric strategy and enable cross-game personalization, marketing and engagement. The team’s mission is to equip game teams with the tools, data, and capabilities needed to deliver impactful player experiences and interactions. The engineering manager will need to bridge content, data, and operations to enable effective marketing across channels inside and outside the games. This may extend to overseeing a virtual team including team members from other Live Ops sub-domains and Game Platform’s Core Data team.1. GoalsGoal 1: Deliver Scalable, Secure and Compliant Consumer Marketing SystemsWhat: Evolve and maintain high-reliability marketing and engagement systems (e.g. Braze, segmentation and events management) that enable player engagement while respecting privacy and player data.Why: Marketing is foundational to driving player engagement: from onboarding new players, reactivating players and nudging active players towards monetization. At King we rely on a combination of third party tools including Braze to work seamlessly with our internal data and Live Ops capabilities. Robust marketing technology reduces friction, supports tentpole events such as All Stars alternative payments and ensures long-term growth in player lifetime value. This role contributes to a virtual team that aims to deliver exceptional, enjoyable and personal experiences to our player base, enabled through technology and an internal operating model that prioritise scalability, collaboration and speed-to-market.Key Activities:Modernize marketing technology and supporting systems to support marketeers’ needs for automated, scalable consumer messaging with high reliability and security.Collaborate with Product and Marketing stakeholders to meet evolving business requirements.Drive standardization and platform-wide adoption of core marketing technology and tools.Potential Success Metrics:30% reduction in setup time for marketing campaigns across games.Player engagement uplift tied to new marketing technology capabilities and data connectivity.Internal NPS from game teams on marketeer experience.Increased productivity per FTE and Elevate daily work (# of campaigns able to be supported)Improved time-to-market for innovation (# of new features built, Reduced time-to-value) and overall Rate of ImprovementGoal 2: Deliver data connections between King and Third-Party systems to improve overall reporting and attribution for all CRM activity and improve automation capabilities (managing dependencies on contributing teams)What: Ensure we build and maintain APIs and services enabling data connectivity in alignment with Candy CRM and Shared Tech Live Ops needs.Why: Availability of data via our Marketing Tech Platform including third-party tools is essential for triggering marketing comms to players and for reporting on campaign effectiveness. A scalable and reusable approach is required and will reduce duplication across games.Key Activities:Design and oversee a unified data-exchange contract between Unified Platform (UP) services and Braze, defining events, attributes, and consent flags.Build real-time and batch pipelines that make gameplay, economy, and segmentation data available to marketeers within defined SLAs.Expose self-serve APIs & SDKs so game teams can push new data attributes or subscribe to downstream campaign results without bespoke work.Orchestrate cross-domain architecture reviews with Game Platform Core Data and Live Ops to ensure reuse of identity, consent, and compliance components (GDPR/CCPA).Automate data-quality monitoring & alerting (e.g., schema drift, null rates, PII violations) and ensure proactive monitoring for stakeholders.Pilot advanced attribution & suppression logic (multi-touch, channel fatigue) and document playbooks for marketers.Potential Success Metrics:Increased scale of activity (ratio of personalised vs bulk comms.)50 % reduction in manual data-mapping effort for new campaigns (measured via onboarding surveys).Marketeer NPS +20 points for “data availability & reliability” dimension versus prior baseline.2. ResponsibilitiesDefine & Communicate the Engineering Strategy for Marketing & PromotionsDevelop a cohesive vision and execution plan across the two teams to deliver scalable, compliant, and game-integrated systems. Align this strategy with Shared Tech’s mission of player-centricity, and King’s business goals of enabling trusted and engaging player experiences.Drive Cross-Domain Collaboration and IntegrationEnsure that Marketing and Promotions systems are interoperable with Game Systems, Live Ops, Economy, and Player Data. Partner across functions to break silos and accelerate safe, secure game delivery.Champion Operational Excellence and Developer ExperienceEmbed high standards of automation, observability, and reliability. Reduce manual overhead for game teams by standardizing integrations and platform contracts. Actively improve onboarding and usage of Social and Identity APIs.Enable Scalable InfrastructureLead engineering delivery of systems that abstract regulatory complexity away from game teams. Partner with CRM and PXO stakeholders to turn requirements into resilient technical capabilities.Foster a High-Performance, Supportive Engineering CultureRecruit, grow, and retain top engineering talent. Promote psychological safety, autonomy, and continuous feedback. Create an inclusive culture where experimentation, knowledge sharing, and accountability thrive.3. Essential KnowledgeMarketing Technology and Live Games as a ServiceDeep understanding of consumer marketing technologies (Braze, Swrve or competitors), secure data management, and Live Ops strategies across devices and platforms.MarTech EngineeringProven ability to build backend services at scale to engage global audiences. Familiarity with MarTech trends and global data privacy regulations.Backend Scalability & OperabilityDemonstrated experience building high-volume, high-availability services with strong observability, alerting, and recovery practices.4. Key SkillsTechnical Strategy & System Architecture: Ability to architect and guide complex distributed systems across identity, compliance, and social domains.Cross-Functional Alignment: Skilled at aligning Legal, Product, Engineering, and Game teams behind a unified technical direction.Execution Excellence & Flow Efficiency: Strong delivery leadership with focus on rapid iteration, automation, and shortening cycle times without sacrificing quality.Organizational Leadership & Coaching: A leader of leaders, able to grow engineering managers and build a resilient, high-trust engineering culture.Change Management & Communication: Comfortable navigating ambiguity, aligning diverse stakeholders, and communicating complex concepts clearly at all levels.About KingWith a mission of Making the World Playful , King is a leading interactive entertainment company with more than 20 years of history of delivering some of the world’s most iconic games in the mobile gaming industry, including the world-famous Candy Crush franchise, as well as other mobile game hits such as Farm Heroes Sag a. King games are played by more than 200 million monthly active users. King, part of Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT), has Kingsters in Stockholm, Malmö, London, Barcelona, Berlin, Dublin, San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles and Malta. More information can be found at King.com or by following us on LinkedIn, @lifeatking on Instagram, or @king_games on X.#J-18808-Ljbffr