Senior Director, Game Analytics

About us and the role

Zynga adopted a bold mission: to connect the world through games. As a part of this mission, our Socialpoint, Gram Games, and Studio-I (Bengaluru, India) studios have successfully managed and grown multiple games over the past several years, with the unique offering of housing the engineering, product, design, analytics, and creative functions for each game out of several locations. 

The Senior Director role will oversee the vision, quality of delivery, and impact from data science & analytics across the several studio game portfolios and global org, with a team of managers and ICs. The role would require you to work alongside business cross-functional leads as a trusted partner and advisor on data strategy aimed at enhancing the end to end experience for our players, right from install through engagement for audience growth. 

The Senior Director would also be tasked with building, retaining and nurturing a high performing team of global managers and ICs, ensuring that Zynga is not just a job but a career destination for everyone. Culture being a critical component of life at Zynga, we would also expect you to positively influence our culture in analytics and beyond based on your unique experiences, and sustain it through active investment in people development. Cultivating collaboration within discipline and x-discipline.

The final facet of this role would be collaborating with peers and leaders across the Analytics org globally to help develop core competency of the function and explore synergies that may provide ROI at scale or opportunities for individual growth.

We are looking for a leader who flexes their style between being visionary, results oriented, relationship focused and a centered thinker; with a proven track record in driving end-to-end analytics and an appetite to challenge the status quo on a global scale. Past experience should include a mastery curve through the following foundational elements -

• Managing and reviewing analytics delivery spanning telemetry, data pipelines, investigations, business intelligence, reporting, ML solutions, experiments and long-term strategic initiatives
• Working with diverse stakeholders from studio leadership, product, marketing, design, and engineering to design a cohesive analytics strategy that not only addresses the immediate business goals, but sets up a consistent pipeline for the future
• Recruiting and retaining high performance teams by investing actively in career growth. Mentoring analysts, data scientists and managers on technical skills, strategic thinking, career goals and long-term vision as a part of formal feedback mechanism
• Ideate with partner studios, central analytics and engineering to invest in the future of analytics through better tools, platforms, scaled solutions or packaged products for end consumption. Tying these opportunities back to individual career development would be a key strength.

Expected candidate profile:

Must have:

• Bachelors or Master’s degree in technical/quantitative field; Masters desirable.
• 15+ years related work experience in Analytics with large datasets, 10+ years in leading high-performing global teams of 50+ data scientists and analysts, including organizational talent planning: hiring, retaining, and investing in growth for performance.
• Strong business acumen and ability to evangelize an up-to-date awareness of where analytics/data science can be leveraged to provide business value across all levels and disciplines. 
• Consistent and proven track record as a leader across responsibilities that have scaled in complexity, leading to demonstrated ability to grow analytical capabilities and deliver strong results.
• A skilled senior leader able to motivate individuals and groups to tackle complex problems and confidently work on often open-ended challenges that will result in tools and methods that deliver impact
• Proven track record in sharing complex results, recommendations and actions in a style that best fits the audience for maximum engagement.
• Demonstrated ability to be a partner, identify winning opportunities and determine complex resolutions cross functionally where needed (e.g. engineers, product managers, analysts, business, and marketing functions at all levels).
• Strong written and verbal communication skills, that allow collaboration and influencing at all levels and cross-functionally, with the right expectation management

Ideally have:

• Enjoys analytics,  but has a strong track record in data science methods and a passion for both to keep up with emerging market  trends and identify opportunities within the business locally and globally
• Experience working in gaming or other technical consumer product facing industries is a bonus 

Experience with different programming languages (e.g. SQL/R/Python) and environments such as Snowflake, Redshift or Databricks, to enable guiding team discussions to determine best solutions or understand cost/quality when planning priorities with managers

What we offer you: