Lead Game Designer

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!

Position Overview:

Zynga is looking for a Lead Game Designer who can help drive the creation of new features on some of Zynga’s top games. The Lead Game Designer will add experience, direction, and measurable performance to the game design process.

What You'll Do:

• You Own, drive, and communicate the vision for major design initiatives

• Recruit and train designers for your initiatives.

• Work closely with product managers, producers, engineers, and artists to design and prototype new gameplay and systems.

• Build and improve tools to make the design pipeline faster and more efficient for the team.

• Be the advocate of good design practices across the studio.

What You Bring:

• Deep understanding of games and what makes them fun, both as gamer and a professional.

• Experience in leading a team of designers.

• 9+ years of professional game development experience as a game designer, experience with system game design.

• Widely played, especially with online and mobile games, with the ability to articulate what is strong/weak about the design of existing games.

• Experience designing mobile F2P games,

• Strong feature design experience

• Excel skills to model and balance game systems and create complex game systems from scratch.

• Experience and interest with player-driven economies

• Understanding of game balance, including statistics, virtual goods, economics and user motivations

• Excellent communication, critical thinking, analysis skills.

• Bachelor’s degree or equivalent professional experience, we further value candidates with graduate degrees and/or top tier university pedigree.

What We Offer You : 

Zynga offers a world-class benefits package that helps support and balance the needs of our teams. To find out more about our benefits, visit the Zynga Benefits

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 accommodationrequest@zynga.com 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).