Engineering Manager, Zynga
More information about location
Social game developer
Be an early applicant
Social game developer
1001+ employees
Be an early applicant
More information about location
1001+ employees
Company mission
To connect the world through games.
Role
Who you are
- The optimal candidate will have experience as a senior engineer working on and maintaining large-scale distributed backend services, and at least four years of experience as an Engineering Manager
- B.Sc. in Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent education / work experience
- 4+ Years experience as an Engineering Manager
- 4+ Years industry experience as a Software Engineer
- Ability to build and maintain roadmaps and schedules for a diverse set of services, balancing support with new projects
- Ability to manage, mentor and lead a distributed team of engineers
- Able to work collaboratively with engineering stakeholders including production, product, and customer engineering teams
- Hands-on experience with low-latency systems and massive-scale backend online services infrastructure in an AWS environment
- A background building backend services in modern languages such as Java or Golang, with the depth to give meaningful feedback and mentorship on microservice architecture, API design, and implementation on a large-scale platform
- Experience with infrastructure-as-code and Kubernetes deployments
- Updates knowledge constantly, always seeking to learn about new technologies
- Excellent communication skills
Desirable
- Experience defining and maintaining SLOs for live services
- Experience with test-driven development and testing frameworks
- Familiar with observability and monitoring platforms such as Datadog
- Experience with JS frameworks, both frontend and backend
- Experience with IaC frameworks such as Terraform and Helm
- Comfortable with low-level investigation of infrastructure and services
- Mobile development experience with a focus on iOS and/or Android
What the job involves
- Zynga is looking for an Engineering Manager in the Chicago, Austin or Toronto areas to lead a newly formed Core Services team within our larger Development and Infrastructure Systems organization in the Central Technology group
- Core Services is a small, distributed team with a mix of engineering skill levels that builds and maintains a number of central services critical to both Central Technology and all games across Zynga
- You will work with the team on a day-to-day basis in partnership with the technical lead to ensure timely, high quality outcomes and technical excellence
- Ensure the team has clearly defined and scoped projects, overseeing timeline scoping and task breakdown with the engineers
- Manage a pod of engineers on the team on a daily basis, both in their tasks as well as morale, career growth and future planning
- Drive standards for technical excellence within the team in partnership with the technical lead
- Review and give feedback to engineering architectures
- Help to monitor and improve engineering process
- Balance maintenance of a wide variety of live services and tools with updates and forward-looking enhancements and refactoring initiatives
Our take
Zynga is a games developer that rode Facebook's platform to success back in the late noughties and early 2010's. It is now one of the biggest casual game producers globally, with a presence across over 170 countries and regions and millions of monthly active users.
Though the company hit a number of roadblocks after its initial success - such as falling stock prices, and numerous calls it was copying other games - its subsequent resurgence is proof of its staying power. It continues to use social media as a distribution channel, and boasts titles such as FarmVille, Merge Dragons! and Words With Friends.
Future success will lie in the company's continued investment in building viral games that people love. It will also need to attune to the social media waves and keep track of where users can be found, as the landscape has become more mobile. In 2024 the company announced it was developing push notifications that enable gameplay without entering the application, which will be an interesting addition to its outputs.
Freddie
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
7% employee growth in 12 months
Company
Funding (last 2 of 7 rounds)
Mar 2011
$490m
SERIES C
Oct 2010
$6.3m
EARLY VC
Total funding: $865.5m
Company benefits
- COMPENSATION - Performance bonuses, opportunities for equity participation & retirement/pension savings support
- HEALTH - Medical, dental & vision covered for employees, with participation for employees eligible dependents, plus disability and life insurance program
- FAMILY - Generous parental leave for birth parents, partners and adoptive families, plus Infertility support, emergency child care and flexible time-off policies
- WELLNESS - Gym benefits, wellness programs, employee assistance programs and generous time-off policies
- FOOD - Food and snacks made in-house or delivered, healthy snack kitchens with drinks and treats, coffee bars, regular social gatherings and happy hours
- WORK & LIFE - Flexible time-off policies (DTO), office rest areas, gaming spaces, employee discounts and more
- TRANSIT BENEFITS - Shuttle service in select locations, commuter/parking benefits, secure bicycle storage, business travel assistance
- RESOURCE GROUPS - Women at Zynga (WAZ), zCares charitable giving, zParents, zEndurance adventure club, BZU, zPride LGBTQ+ inclusion and belonging
Company HQ
SoMa, San Francisco, CA
Leadership
Mark Pincus
(Chairman & Co-founder)Previously founder and CEO of Freeloader, Supportsoft and Tribe.net, an early social network
Michael Luxton
(Co-founder)Previously an engineer at NetApp
Salary benchmarks
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