Creative Assembly on cord

Creative Assembly

Franchise Design Director

External position
Hiring internally for Creative Assembly?
Gaming
European game developer, founded in 1987 and located in the UK and Bulgaria. Creator of Total War and Alien: Isolation
Posted
a month ago
Checked
cord regularly checks that external positions are still open
2 days ago

Skills & Experience

Job roles: Head of Design
Experience level: Senior, Lead, Leadership
Core skills considered: Building Teams, Business Analysis, Communication software, Content strategy
Other skills considered: Copywriting, Project Management, Stakeholder Management

Logistics

Base salary: Undisclosed
Some companies on cord are unable to disclose salaries publicly due to internal company policies. Message the company for salary information.
Employment type: Permanent
Remote working: Hybrid (up to 2 remote days p/w)
Visa sponsorship: Not available

Job Description

Creative Assembly is looking for a Franchise Design Director who will be accountable for developing the expertise of the Total War design discipline, the design craft and methodologies, and the franchise design strategy. You'll oversee all aspects of the design teams across Total War: how we think about design, and how we deliver player value, excitement and joy. Player value is our principle that everything we make has to be worth our players' time, and you'll champion it in every design strategy. You will take a long-term view of how we grow design expertise, grounded in player feedback and data-informed creativity.


What you'll be doing

On a day-to-day basis, you will:


1. Design discipline management

  • Organising the discipline management structure to provide quality people management (hiring, onboarding, 1:1s, career development, clear communication and escalation paths, motivation, performance management, feedback, helping with project placement/allocation in collaboration with Resource Managers etc.)
  • Building a formal design capability pathway: a competency framework, career progression and an onboarding programme, so every designer has a clear route to expert level whichever discipline they came from
  • Owning the design hiring bar: role profiles, interview design and calibration, and building CA's reputation as a destination for world-class design talent
  • Design craft & methodologies (establishing and maintaining standards, continuous improvement process)
  • Collaborates with: HR, Resource Managers, Product Team Leads (Producers* and Product Owners), Discipline Team Leads

2. Support and development of Project Creative Directors

  • Provides communication line between Franchise Leadership Team and Project teams on a frequent basis
  • Craft leadership and support: holding the agreed goals and direction, coaching Creative Directors on design craft, and adapting quickly when needed
  • Design Craft support
  • Collaborates with: (Project Leadership) Producers & Creative Directors, (Stream Aligned Teams) Product Owners & sub-discipline leads, Franchise Leadership Team, Head of Product

3. General Franchise Design - Analysis & R&D

  • Exploration and analysis of the existing and evolving design of the Total War franchise
  • Create and maintain a franchise design vision and philosophy that matches our franchise vision.
  • Seeks opportunities and areas for improvement or advancement
  • Defining what Total War design is and turning it into teachable material the discipline can be formally trained against
  • Collaborates with: Product, Brand & Player research

Use your experience to promote our company values and culture, keep the working environment positive and inclusive, provide mentoring and coaching, and build high-performing teams.

You will be responsible for the overall Design strategy

You'll work with your Franchise Leadership Team colleagues on the internal and external strategy for the design discipline and the wider business

Anticipate and solve problems, on your own and with senior leadership. Get clarity and decisions quickly, step in to build consensus, and agree a way forward.


What we are looking for


Experience & Skills


Essential

  • Multiple shipped titles, including at least one shipped in a design leadership role (Lead, Principal, Design Director or equivalent)
  • A proven track record of growing designers. You've built and run structured development for a design team, whether that's competency frameworks, career progression, onboarding or mentoring, and you can show what changed as a result
  • Experience developing designers who came into design from other disciplines, and a clear view of how to build formal training that makes good instincts repeatable and teachable
  • A track record of raising a hiring bar: you have designed and calibrated interview processes for design roles and attracted senior design talent to a studio
  • Demonstrate a passion for all things game design and a keen interest in games development overall
  • You have broad knowledge of games across platforms and genres, and an ongoing desire to learn about the craft. You play everything
  • You have a strong understanding of player motivation and what makes gamers tick
  • You treat design as a craft that is both art and science - something that can be understood, taught and improved, and you apply that knowledge and curiosity to any genre you work in.
  • You have a clear, well-articulated design philosophy and can explain how it shapes your practice.
  • You are constantly up to date on trends in the games industry and in entertainment more broadly
  • You play analytically. You can explain why a game works, not just whether you liked it, and you can build deep knowledge of the Total War series quickly.
  • Attention to detail and a passion for making quality products
  • Self-motivated, focussed, and consistently delivers high-quality work
  • A strong communicator who writes clearly and succinctly
  • A constructive approach to complex problem solving and teamwork
  • You have a high quality bar and a need to drive excellence in your craft and in the work of those around you. When something isn't good enough, you can coach, mentor, and explain why that's so.
  • You can drive consensus and navigate teams to the best outcomes. You always work to build bridges, and you let the best idea win regardless of where it came from.
  • Accountability is critical for yourself and others. You demonstrate accountability and you require it of others around you.
  • Confident working with data and spreadsheets to interrogate design decisions

Desirable

  • Modding experience
  • VB, C++, Python, Art skills, Writing skills
  • Experience working on strategy titles
  • Experience working on design tools
  • Experience of using metrics to improve design
  • Critical thinking training
  • Experience of formal design education, teaching or academic training in design or a related discipline
  • Experience working with IP holders
  • An interest in history
Franchise Design Director at Creative Assembly
Position posted a month ago

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Starling Bank on cord

Starling Bank

Full Stack Engineer (ML Ops)

London, UK
FinTech · Banking · Finance
A better bank for everyone
Active
over 6 months ago
Responds to
0% of requests
Responds in
1h 55m
Requests
7 pending

Skills & Experience

Job roles: Full Stack
Experience level: Mid, Senior
Core skills considered: Java, React, Redux, AWS, JavaScript

Logistics

Base salary: £70K - £110K
Employment type: Permanent
Remote working: Hybrid (up to 2 remote days p/w)
Visa sponsorship: Not available

Job Description

Starling is the UK’s first and leading digital bank on a mission to fix banking! Our vision is fast technology, fair service, and honest values. All at the tap of a phone, all the time.

Starling is the UK’s first and leading digital bank on a mission to fix banking! We built a new kind of bank because we knew technology had the power to help people save, spend and manage their money in a new and transformative way.

We’re a fully licensed UK bank with the culture and spirit of a fast-moving, disruptive tech company. We’re a bank, but better: fairer, easier to use and designed to demystify money for everyone. We employ more than 3,000 people across our London, Southampton, Cardiff and Manchester offices.

Our technologists are at the very heart of Starling and enjoy working in a fast-paced environment that is all about building things, creating new stuff, and disruptive technology that keeps us on the cutting edge of fintech. We operate a flat structure to empower you to make decisions regardless of what your primary responsibilities may be, innovation and collaboration will be at the core of everything you do. Help is never far away in our open culture, you will find support in your team and from across the business, we are in this together!

The way to thrive and shine within Starling is to be a self-driven individual and be able to take full ownership of everything around you: From building things, designing, discovering, to sharing knowledge with your colleagues and making sure all processes are efficient and productive to deliver the best possible results for our customers. Our purpose is underpinned by five Starling values: Listen, Keep It Simple, Do The Right Thing, Own It, and Aim For Greatness.

Hybrid Working

We have a Hybrid approach to working here at Starling - our preference is that you're located within a commutable distance of one of our offices so that we're able to interact and collaborate in person. We don't like to mandate how much you visit the office and work from home, that's to be agreed upon between you and your manager.

Our Data Environment

Our Data teams are excited about the value of data within the business, powers our product decisions to improve things for our customers and enhance effective and agile decision making, regardless of what their primary tech stack may be. Hear from the team in our latest blogs or our case studies with Women in Tech.

We are looking for talented data professionals at all levels to join the team. We value people being engaged and caring about customers, caring about the code they write and the contribution they make to Starling. People with a broad ability to apply themselves to a multitude of problems and challenges, who can work across teams do great things here at Starling, to continue changing banking for good.

Requirements

We have built our entire banking platform in house and mostly in Java. We are looking for people who want to work on building the tooling that is used by our engineers on a daily basis.

We are looking for people who are truly full stack, and are as comfortable polishing their javascript front end as they are debugging the innards of their java applications database interactions, or standing up infrastructure with terraform. We are looking for people who can:

  • Design REST apis.
  • Code backend services, ideally using Java, or another other server side compiled language.
  • Develop modern front ends, ideally using React and Redux.
  • Get their code into the cloud and support it there, ideally on AWS.
  • Believe in clean coding, simple solutions, automated testing and continuous deployment.
  • Like to take ownership of a feature from the original idea through to live.
  • Think (like us) that a small number of empowered developers is the right way to deliver software.

Company Benefits

  • 33 days holiday (including flexible bank holidays)
  • An extra day’s holiday for your birthday
  • 16 hours paid volunteering time a year
  • Part-time and/or flexible hours available for most roles
  • Salary sacrifice, company enhanced pension scheme
  • Life insurance at 4x your salary
  • Hybrid/remote working
  • Private Medical Insurance with VitalityHealth including mental health support and cancer care. Partner benefits include discounts with Waitrose, Mr&Mrs Smith and Peloton
  • Generous family-friendly policies
  • Varied social groups set up and run by our employees
  • Perkbox membership giving access to retail discounts, a wellness platform for physical and mental health, and weekly free and boosted perks
  • Access to initiatives like Cycle to Work, Salary Sacrificed Gym partnerships and Electric Vehicle (EV) leasing

Full details are available on our careers site

Interview Process

Interviewing is a two way process and we want you to have the time and opportunity to get to know us, as much as we are getting to know you! Our interviews are conversational and we want to get the best from you, so come with questions and be curious. In general you can expect the below, following a chat with one of our Talent Team:

  • Stage 1 - 30 mins with one of the team
  • Stage 2 - Take home challenge
  • Stage 3 - 90 mins technical interview with two team members
  • Stage 3 - 45 min final with an executive and a member of the people team
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