Engineering Manager
Zynga
Salary undisclosed
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Description
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 an Engineering Manager in the Chicago, Austin or Toronto areas to lead a newly formed Core Services team within our larger Development and Infrastructure Systems organization in the Central Technology group. Core Services is a small, distributed team with a mix of engineering skill levels that builds and maintains a number of central services critical to both Central Technology and all games across Zynga.
The optimal candidate will have experience as a senior engineer working on and maintaining large-scale distributed backend services, and at least four years of experience as an Engineering Manager. You will work with the team on a day-to-day basis in partnership with the technical lead to ensure timely, high quality outcomes and technical excellence.
What You'll Do:
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Ensure the team has clearly defined and scoped projects, overseeing timeline scoping and task breakdown with the engineers
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Manage a pod of engineers on the team on a daily basis, both in their tasks as well as morale, career growth and future planning
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Drive standards for technical excellence within the team in partnership with the technical lead
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Review and give feedback to engineering architectures
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Help to monitor and improve engineering process
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Balance maintenance of a wide variety of live services and tools with updates and forward-looking enhancements and refactoring initiatives.
What You Bring:
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B.Sc. in Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent education / work experience
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4+ Years experience as an Engineering Manager
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4+ Years industry experience as a Software Engineer
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Ability to build and maintain roadmaps and schedules for a diverse set of services, balancing support with new projects
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Ability to manage, mentor and lead a distributed team of engineers.
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Able to work collaboratively with engineering stakeholders including production, product, and customer engineering teams.
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Hands-on experience with low-latency systems and massive-scale backend online services infrastructure in an AWS environment
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A background building backend services in modern languages such as Java or Golang, with the depth to give meaningful feedback and mentorship on microservice architecture, API design, and implementation on a large-scale platform.
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Experience with infrastructure-as-code and Kubernetes deployments
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Updates knowledge constantly, always seeking to learn about new technologies
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Excellent communication skills
Bonus Points:
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Experience defining and maintaining SLOs for live services
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Experience with test-driven development and testing frameworks
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Familiar with observability and monitoring platforms such as Datadog
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Experience with JS frameworks, both frontend and backend
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Experience with IaC frameworks such as Terraform and Helm
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Comfortable with low-level investigation of infrastructure and services
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Mobile development experience with a focus on iOS and/or Android
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 site
Please note that Zynga is unable to provide visa sponsorship or assistance for this position. All candidates must be legally authorized to work in the United States without requiring current or future employer sponsorship.
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, take2games.com, naturalmotion.com, smallgiantgames.com, themavens.com, gram.gs email domain).
About this role
Zynga's Core Services team in Austin needs an Engineering Manager to lead a small, distributed group building and maintaining critical backend infrastructure across the company's game portfolio. This role sits within the Central Technology organization and requires someone with substantial hands-on experience: at least four years managing engineers, plus four years as a senior software engineer working on large-scale distributed systems. You'll partner closely with a technical lead to define project scope, mentor engineers through their work and career development, set technical standards, and balance ongoing service maintenance with new initiatives—all while working in-office.
The ideal candidate has deep backend expertise in Java or Golang, knows AWS infrastructure at scale, and can give meaningful feedback on microservice architecture and API design. You should be comfortable with infrastructure-as-code, Kubernetes, and modern observability tools, and able to work across distributed teams including product and production engineering. A Computer Science degree or equivalent is required, and you must already be authorized to work in the US—visa sponsorship is not available.
This is a hands-on leadership role for someone who wants to stay technically sharp while growing as a manager. It suits engineers who've moved into management but miss the technical depth, and who thrive working on foundational systems that power multiple products rather than a single game.
How this employer is doing
average
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Typical pay for this role
$120,000
Typical range: $80,000 to $140,000
This role's local market on JobMinglr
Pay for this role
The employer didn't post a pay range for this role. That usually means pay is set in negotiation, which favors whoever arrives with numbers. Check ranges on comparable Engineering Manager postings in Austin, and analyze any offer before you accept it.
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