Senior Manager, Player Experience

Role Description

First off, you care deeply about chess and the people who play it. You've got real experience with the game, and our mission genuinely matters to you. You know our products well, or you'll dive in hard to get there, and you can't use them without noticing the moments where a real person would get stuck, confused, or quietly give up. You'd rather watch one real player struggle through a flow than read ten dashboards about it. You believe a funnel chart tells you where players drop, but only watching a real human hit that wall tells you why, and makes you care enough to do something about it.

This role exists to make our products serve real people, not just experiment metrics. You are the company's clearest window into the actual human experience of using Chess.com, and your job is to keep that experience honest, felt, and acted upon across the whole organization. You'll work closely with senior leadership, including the CEO and CGO, and it's on you to figure out how to reach into product, design, data, research, and community to drive change. The breadth is the point. You'll stand up and lead the function, managing a small, hands-on team directly and extending your reach far wider through the people you influence, not just the ones who report to you.

What you'll do

• Get inside the experience of real players.
• Spend real time watching actual players, and people who aren't players yet, use our products.
• Close the loop, don't just generate insight.
• Make sure every kind of player has a seat at the table.
• Turn signal into action across the company.
• Spread the mindset.
• Own the experience.
• Lead and grow the function.
• Use AI to move fast.

Qualifications

• A track record of changing products through deep user understanding.
• A bias for watching over assuming.
• AI-native.
• First-principles thinker with real empathy.
• High-velocity, work-out-loud communicator.
• Comfortable with both qualitative and quantitative signal.
• A builder of influence across the whole company.
• You've managed or closely mentored a small team, or you're ready to step into it.
• You love chess and care deeply about our mission, and about players at every level.
• If you're light on Chess.com specifically, you make up for it by diving in hard before you ever walk in the door.

About the Opportunity

• We are 100% remote (work from anywhere!).
• US time zone overlap. Most of this role's key stakeholders are across the US.

You can learn more about us here: