Engineering Manager

As an Engineering Manager in Candy Crush Soda Saga's Gameplay and Monetisation Domain, you'll combine line management with hands-on technical leadership across the systems that define how Soda is played, rewarded, and monetised. Your work spans core gameplay mechanics, monetisation flows, content delivery at scale, and the internal tooling that powers them. 

King's second largest game, Candy Crush Soda Saga, is loved by millions of players worldwide, matching Swedish fish, rescued Soda gummy bears, and popped soda bottles to win points, defeat obstacles and progress through almost 20,000 levels. We're an iconic team growing a sweeter future for one of the biggest casual mobile IPs in the world through attracting the world's best talent. Our ambition is to continue crushing it for our players when it comes to creativity, product, and technology! 

• Reporting to the Domain Engineering Lead, you'll line-manage and grow a group of engineers working across multiple feature teams in Gameplay and Monetisation - hiring, onboarding, performance management, mentoring and coaching. You'll help each engineer develop their craft and career, and contribute to building stronger connection, clarity, ownership and psychological safety across the Domain. 
   

• Partner with Product Managers, Design and Creative, QA and engineering peers to shape and deliver roadmaps - coordinating dependencies across feature teams, aligning on longer-term plans, and ensuring your Domain's work aligns with Soda's product vision and goals, and fits cleanly into the broader game and platform ecosystem.  
   

• Provide hands-on technical leadership in Gameplay and Monetisation, contributing to the codebase on a regular basis - as an IC or Tech Lead embedded within a feature team. Review designs, surface technical risks early, guide architectural choices, and balance speed and quality against Soda's broader technical direction and shared technology platforms. 
   

• Represent Gameplay and Monetisation in cross-domain and cross-Soda engineering forums - sharing learnings, contributing to shared engineering standards and ways of working, and bridging your engineers into the wider tech community at King.
   

• Champion a strong experimentation culture - using A/B tests, live data and player insights to drive technical and product decisions, and ensuring the engineers you support feel accountable for measurable player and business outcomes. 

​Soda is a large, mature C++ codebase that has been delivered to millions of mobile players for over a decade. You'll work with purpose-built internal tooling for content, level design and live configuration, alongside King's shared platforms for analytics, experimentation and live operations. 

Experience 

• Experience leading and developing software engineers, including performance management, career growth and day-to-day coaching in a product development environment. 

• Strong technical background, able to engage deeply in design and architecture and contribute to a C++ codebase on a regular basis. 

• Track record of planning and delivering complex technical solutions, balancing short-term needs with longer-term architectural and product goals, ideally in a high-scale or game-as-a-service context. 

Knowledge & Skills 

• Strong grasp of modern software engineering practices (testing, code review, CI, observability) and a track record of contributing to and upholding shared engineering standards. 

• Proficiency in C++ and the ability to reason about mobile performance, memory, frame-time budgets, and stability at scale. 

• Comfort working in an experimentation-driven environment - able to design, interpret and act on A/B tests, and to use live data to guide technical decisions. 

• Ability to collaborate effectively with non-technical partners, translating between technical and business perspectives and aligning stakeholders around clear, practical plans. 

Key Attributes 

• Values-based, team-first leader with a down-to-earth, collaborative style who leads by example and builds trust across disciplines. 

• Comfortable operating amid ambiguity: able to move forward when priorities or requirements are still evolving, make pragmatic trade-offs, and adjust course as you learn. 

• Curious, proactive and outcome-focused, with a strong sense of ownership for both your team's health and the impact of your team's work on players and the business. 

How We Work 

Our Team First, Hybrid Working model empowers teams across the Kingdom to decide how they want to work together, with a mix of in office and home working. 

If you're excited about this role but don't meet every single requirement, we'd still love to hear from you. We know that candidates from underrepresented backgrounds may hesitate to apply unless they match every point, and we're interested in your potential as well as your experience.