Careers Category: Game Design

Careers location: Austin, TX, Bay Area, CA, Los Angeles, CA, Remote, US, Remote, Canada

Connected Worker Type: Offsite

Requisition Id: R_109757

Zynga is looking for a Senior Game Design Principal to join our NFT/Blockchain organization (ZBC)

Our mission within Zynga Blockchain Games is to empower players to invest, own and earn through fun, high-quality and enduring blockchain games they can trust.  If you want to help shape the future of gaming with a world-class team, we look forward to hearing from you.

You have a passion for games and have mastered your craft in free-to-play design. You see the paradigm shift into NFT, blockchain gaming and are excited to pioneer the movement of open crypto economies and governance models. Your deep understanding of complex game systems and economies has prepared you to collaborate closely with ZBC’s key stakeholders to deliver designs from concept to implementation.

In your role with ZBC you will have a consistent record of owning and delivering experiences to players that raises-the-bar from innovation whilst thriving in a fast-paced, dynamic environment.

Responsibilities:

• Apply your design masteries to pioneer new best practices in systems design in NFT, blockchain gaming and pave the road for the ZBC pipeline 

• Conceptualize, design, and prepare documentation for new features and content including game modes, meta progression, social rule-based events and tokenomics models.

• Create economy models and tuning/balancing simulations to find harmony in your systems and economy design.

• Lead the design of NFTs (and NFT drops), new tokens, and other on-chain items (tokenomics), always designing from the player perspective to ensure the highest level of usability, playability, and balance.

• Work with Producers to schedule and scope features, providing them with the necessary system design documentation and mockups to deliver to art, engineering, and QA teams.

• Research the latest blockchain and free-to-play design models and implement these best practices into the economy 

• Explore and provide guidance around decentralized governance

• Work hard and lead by example.

Requirements: 

• 5+ years of systems design, economy modeling, and tuning data simulations. Direct experience operating a top grossing game is a plus.

• Knowledge of macro, microeconomics, pricing theory, and statistics, especially in the free-to-play gaming industry, with the ability to model problems into quantitative systems, formulate ratios and indexes specific to each game 

• Ability to model and simulate planned changes, overall sinks, and sources while anticipating downstream effects with post-launch analysis to ensure expected outcomes are reached 

• Advanced understanding of Excel, SQL, and/or Python + R, SPSS, SAS or other statistical analysis software 

• Collaborative and excels in communicating with product managers, analysts, and executives. 

• Bachelor’s Degree in Economics, Finance, Statistics, Computer Science, Engineering, or another quantitative field 

• Love for games 

• Intrigued by blockchain and NFT technology

Desired Skills 

• Understanding of web3, blockchain, defi, gamefi and crypto is a plus.

• Understand between economics (predictive goals) and tokenomics (design goals).

• Understanding of free-to-play games and live ops 

• Experience contributing to risk and profitability decisions in a marketplace setting 

• A background in building MMOs is also a plus

• Masters or PhD in Economics with a focus on Mechanism Design

WHAT WE OFFER YOU

• Competitive salary, discretionary annual bonus scheme, Zynga stock allowance and employee stock purchase plan

• Contributory 401k

• Unlimited PTO

• 6 months fully paid maternity leave or 3 months fully paid paternity leave

• Medical and Dental Coverage

• Life insurance and critical illness insurance

• Discounted gym memberships

• Flexible working hours and remote working opportunities

• Dog friendly workspaces! 

We are an equal opportunity employer and we are committed to building a diverse and talented workforce. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, sex, religion, colour, national origin, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, medical condition, disability, or any other class or characteristic protected by applicable law. We welcome job-seekers, players, employees, and partners from all backgrounds to join us!

We will consider all qualified job-seekers with criminal histories in a manner consistent with applicable law.

We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations to qualified individuals with physical or mental disabilities in order to participate in the job application or interview process, to perform essential job functions, and to receive other benefits and privileges of employment. Please contact us at AccommodationRequest@https://zynga.com to request an accommodation associated with your application for an open position.

Zynga does not  engage in financial exchanges during the recruitment or onboarding process. We do not conduct job interviews over third-party messaging apps such as Telegram, WhatsApp or others. We will never ask you for your personal or financial information over unofficial chat channels. Our in-house recruitment team only contacts individuals via official company email addresses (https://i.e., via a https://zynga.com or https://naturalmotion.com email domain).

If you believe you have been the victim of a scam, you may wish to contact the authorities. In the United States, you may file a complaint with the FBI. More information is available here: https://www.ic3.gov.

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