Senior Game Designer

JobsCloseBy Editorial Insights

Zynga is seeking a Senior Game Designer for Gram Games in London, with a hybrid setup and two days weekly in office, to own bold features and balance across systems. You will lead design of levels, mechanics and features, collaborating with developers, artists, product managers and stakeholders while ensuring technical feasibility and ROI. You’ll prototype, playtest, analyze competitors, maintain design docs and pitch visions. The ideal candidate has proven game design experience, excellent communication, and the ability to translate player needs into product while driving business impact and KPI alignment. Tips: curate a portfolio with end-to-end design and tuning; demonstrate autonomy and collaboration; apply through official Zynga channels and highlight Gram titles or liveops experience.

Level Up Your Career with Zynga!

At Zynga, we bring people together through the power of play. As a global leader in interactive entertainment and a proud label of Take-Two Interactive, our games have been downloaded over 6 billion times—connecting players in 175+ countries through fun, strategy, and a little friendly competition.

From thrilling casino spins to epic strategy battles, mind-bending puzzles, and social word challenges, our diverse game portfolio has something for everyone. Fan-favorites and latest hits include FarmVille™, Words With Friends™, Zynga Poker™, Game of Thrones Slots Casino™, Wizard of Oz Slots™, Hit it Rich! Slots™, Wonka Slots™, Top Eleven™, Toon Blast™, Empires & Puzzles™, Merge Dragons!™, CSR Racing™, Harry Potter: Puzzles & Spells™, Match Factory™, and Color Block Jam™—plus many more!

Founded in 2007 and headquartered in California, our teams span North America, Europe, and Asia, working together to craft unforgettable gaming experiences. Whether you're spinning, strategizing, matching, or competing, Zynga is where fun meets innovation—and where you can take your career to the next level.

Join us and be part of the play!

Who We Are:  

Gram Games is the studio behind popular titles like 1010!, Six!, Merge Dragons!, and Merge Magic!, with more exciting projects in the pipeline. We are proudly part of the Zynga & Take-Two Interactive family. We do things differently here: we work in small self-managing teams, giving you an incredible amount of ownership, autonomy, and impact. 

At Gram, everyone is expected to have a razor-sharp focus on creating a tangible impact on their team, their work environment, and on the overall company strategy. If you are motivated by autonomy, constant improvement, collaboration, and a sense of belonging, this is the place for you.

At Gram we embrace a hybrid work environment. Within this role, you would work 2 days per week in our London office and the remaining days at home.

Position Overview:

As a Senior Game Designer, you will be responsible for new features, up to and including bold beat scope and impact. You will take on more complex design challenges and lead the development of key game mechanics, levels, and features. As an adept in systems, mechanics, and player experience; you will be accountable for maintaining coherence and balance across entire game. Support the leaders by providing experiential insights from the player perspective. 

What You'll Do:

• Ideate and design new levels, gameplay, systems or features with minimal supervision
• Collaborate with developers, artists, product managers & other stakeholders to integrate design elements into the game
• Ensure technical feasibility, clear visual direction and high ROI from design solutions
• Conduct research and apply competition insights to support design concepts and ideas
• Create design solutions to drive business impact while leveraging player experience and game KPI’s
• Analyze and deconstruct competitor games to stay up to date on the market & share actionable insights & learnings
• Present compelling design pitches & project visions to stakeholders
• Create & maintain comprehensive game design documentation for the team
• Tune and balance complex gameplay mechanics to ensure an engaging player experience
• Playtest designs, conduct player research and iterate on designs based on feedback
• Prototype, propose new designs, and develop solutions to improve existing systems and address complex design problems, ensuring all efforts are explicitly aligned with the high-level strategic goals of the game
• Ensure a high level of quality to achieve the best player experience

What You Bring:

• Previous experience as a Game Designer 
• Established verbal, written, and interpersonal communication skills
• Ability to understand and translate players’ requirements into product
• Clear cross‐functional communication at the team level, capable of explaining and evangelizing a design in conversation with peers

What We Offer You: 

• Highly competitive salary
• Private medical care
• Company bonus scheme
• Relocation assistance for those moving to the UK
• Awesome onsite chef serving breakfast, lunch, and lots of treats (naughty and nice)
• Life insurance and a favorable pension scheme
• Healthcare cash plan including dental and optical coverage
• Amazing tech to work with and consoles to play and relax with everywhere you look!

#LI-Hybrid

We are proud to be an equal opportunity employer, which means we are committed to creating and celebrating diverse thoughts, cultures, and backgrounds throughout our organization.  Employment with us is based on substantive ability, objective qualifications, and work ethic – not an individual’s race, creed, color, religion, sex or gender, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, national origin or ancestry, alienage or citizenship status, physical or mental disability, pregnancy, age, genetic information, veteran status, marital status, status as a victim of domestic violence or sex offenses, reproductive health decision, or any other characteristics protected by applicable law.

As an equal opportunity employer, we are committed to providing the necessary support and accommodation to qualified individuals with disabilities, health conditions, or impairments (subject to any local qualifying requirements) to ensure their full participation in the job application or interview process. Please contact us at [email protected] to request any accommodations or for support related to your application for an open position.

Please be aware that Zynga does not conduct job interviews or make job offers over third-party messaging apps such as Telegram, WhatsApp, or others.  Zynga also does not engage in any financial exchanges during the recruitment or onboarding process, and will never ask a candidate for their personal or financial information over an app or other unofficial chat channel.  Any attempt to do so may be the result of a scamp or phishing attack, and you should not engage.  Zynga’s  in-house recruitment team will only contact individuals through their official Company email addresses (i.e., via a zynga.com, naturalmotion.com, smallgiantgames.com, themavens.com, gram.gs email domain).