Lead Game Designer

Lead Game Designer

We are hiring a Lead Game Designer for a remote position who will own the design vision and quality bar across our games while building and mentoring a multidisciplinary game design team that consistently delivers high-quality, data-informed experiences. This is a product-focused leadership role responsible for improving retention, engagement, progression, and monetization by defining a clear design direction, maintaining a high standard of design quality, and driving a disciplined A/B testing and design R&D practice. The role is fully remote and requires at least 4–5 hours of daily overlap with Pakistan Standard Time (GMT+5).

This role is ideal for someone who: sets a clear design vision and holds a high quality bar without becoming a bottleneck is hands-on with systems design and design documentation, not only management builds and mentors designers toward domain specialization uses data and experimentation to prioritize and validate design decisions

Core Responsibilities

1) Design Vision & Direction

Own the design vision for all products, setting the design foundation and guiding designers at a high level. Align with Studio Head and Game Leads on where each game's design is headed. Co-own the design direction of each product with Game Leads; escalate major design pivots to the Studio Head. Turn ambiguity into clear design direction and build-ready decisions.

2) Design Quality Bar (Hands-on)

Set and maintain standards for all design documentation, sheets, A/B tests, and playtesting protocols. Review specs, economy and progression sheets, and feature docs for completeness, clarity, and applied data analytics. Lead the design of major systems where needed: core loop, progression, economy, monetization, and LiveOps. Establish and maintain a clear design quality bar across the studio.

3) Design Team Development & Specialization

Hire, onboard, and mentor game designers to be multidisciplinary and eventually specialize across three domains: Gameplay, Retention & Engagement Economy, Progression & Data Monetization & LiveOps Run weekly 1:1s with all direct reports. Build successor capability: at least one designer ready to lead design on a product. Reduce the number of design decisions that escalate to Game Leads and the Studio Head.

4) A/B Testing Ownership

Own the studio-wide A/B testing pipeline and set best practices for hypotheses, test documentation, analysis, and decision-making. Co-own A/B test and feature-shipping prioritization with Game Leads. Convert test insights into backlog priorities and measurable design actions.

5) Design R&D & Analytics

Lead R&D in game design tools and best practices, data analysis pipelines and dashboards, and predictive modelling. Stay current on every product's analytics and dashboards. Learn and apply data analytics and predictive modelling to at least one product.

6) Playtesting & Design Fluency

Involve the whole studio in frequent playtesting sessions (our products and beyond). Maintain a personal playtime practice of roughly 3 hours per product weekly, and feed notes into designer 1:1s. Attend design reviews as a participant and quality challenger, not the sole decision-maker.

7) Stakeholder Communication & Clarity

Keep leadership updated with clear status, risks, and next steps. Write concise decision notes that reduce confusion and rework. Ensure the team has clarity on what success looks like for each design initiative.

Key Deliverables (Expected Outputs)

A clear, documented design vision and direction for each product. A maintained design quality bar: standards and templates for specs, sheets, A/B tests, and playtesting. A multidisciplinary design team with visible progress on each designer's specialization track. A running studio-wide A/B testing pipeline with quality hypotheses, documentation, and analysis. Design R&D output applied to live products (tools, dashboards, predictive models). Regular design reviews with clear decisions, action items, and ownership.

Decision Rights & Interfaces

Design hires, exits, and specialization paths. Studio-wide design quality standards and review metrics. A/B testing methodology and pipeline. Design tooling and R&D investment. You co-own (with Game Leads) Design direction of each product. A/B test and feature-shipping prioritization. Major design scope decisions affecting team capacity. You co-own (with the Studio Head) Studio-level design strategy and big design decisions. Budget for design tools, R&D, and design-team headcount. You influence / support Retention, monetization, and player-experience improvements via design changes, experiments, and insight-driven recommendations. Individual designers retain authority on Specific feature design decisions within the agreed direction. Day-to-day design execution and documentation on their assigned product. Escalate to the Studio Head Anything affecting studio-level commitments (GP, ROI, capacity). Major design pivots on a product. Cross-studio or group-level design topics.

Requirements (Must Have)

5-10+ years in mobile F2P game design, with meaningful time spent leading or mentoring designers. Shipped multiple live products or major updates, not just prototypes. Strong systems design fundamentals: gameplay, retention, progression, economy, monetization, LiveOps. Strong design documentation: specs, economy and progression sheets, and tuning plans that engineers and artists can build without guessing. A/B testing ownership: hypotheses, test design, analysis, and decision-making. Comfortable with product analytics and dashboards (e.g., ByteBrew, Adjust) to drive design decisions. Comfortable leading remotely and influencing without authority. Very strong English (written and spoken).

Nice-to-Haves

Hybrid simulation / management (sim/tycoon) game expertise. Experience building a multidisciplinary design team and specialization tracks from scratch. Familiarity with predictive modelling and building design analytics pipelines and dashboards. Familiarity with Unity pipelines and constraints (no coding required). Experience working with teams across multiple time zones.

Tools We Use

Coda (documentation hub) Miro (flows, maps, UX collaboration) Asana (tasks + planning) Slack (daily communication) ByteBrew / Adjust (analytics & dashboards)

Working Model

Remote High-ownership role. We care about outcomes, not meetings. Must be available for key overlap hours with GMT+5 for reviews and alignment