Head of Engineering

SciPlay is a leading developer and publisher of digital games on mobile and web platforms, providing highly entertaining free-to-play games that millions of people play every day for their authenticity, engagement and fun.

SciPlay currently offers nine core games, including social casino games Jackpot Party Casino, Gold Fish Casino Slots, Hot Shot Casino and Quick Hit Slots, and casual games MONOPOLY Slots, Bingo Showdown, 88 Fortunes Slots, Backgammon Live and Solitaire Pet Adventure with offices all over the world!

Position Summary

Serve as the Head of Engineering for 88 Fortunes, leading the engineering organization responsible for the game’s Unity client and backend services. As a member of the 88 Fortunes studio leadership team, this role also contributes to the studio’s broader strategic direction and priorities. This role combines people leadership, technical direction, delivery ownership, and hands-on architectural judgment across the full product stack.

Key Responsibilities :

• Own the engineering strategy, execution, and technical roadmap for 88 Fortunes across client and backend development.

• Lead, coach, and grow engineering managers and senior engineers, building a high-performing and accountable organization.

• Create clear ownership, operating rhythms, engineering standards, and measurable goals across teams.

• Partner closely with Product, Design, QA, Analytics, Live Operations, DevOps, and other stakeholders to translate business priorities into reliable delivery plans.

• Drive predictable execution, release quality, technical risk management, and continuous improvement across the software development lifecycle.

• Balance feature delivery with platform health, architecture evolution, scalability, security, observability, and reduction of technical debt.

• Own hiring, workforce planning, succession planning, and development of engineering talent.

• Establish and track engineering metrics covering delivery, quality, reliability, operational health, and team effectiveness.

• Communicate technical direction, tradeoffs, risks, and progress clearly to senior leadership and non-technical stakeholders.

Requirements:

• Extensive software engineering experience, including significant leadership of multiple teams or an engineering organization.

• Proven experience delivering complex, customer-facing products that include both client applications and backend services.

• Strong technical depth in at least one side of the stack, with demonstrated ability to lead architecture and make sound decisions across both client and backend domains.

• Experience leading Unity client development or closely related real-time, mobile, or game-client technologies.

• Strong backend engineering experience with APIs, distributed systems, databases, cloud infrastructure, scalability, reliability, and production operations.

• Experience hiring, coaching, and developing managers, technical leaders, and senior individual contributors.

• Ability to combine strategic thinking with pragmatic execution and to make clear tradeoffs among scope, quality, speed, and technical sustainability.

• Excellent written and verbal communication skills, including the ability to influence across functions and at executive level.

Client Engineering Leadership (Unity):

• Provide technical and organizational leadership for Unity-based client development.

• Guide architecture and engineering practices for maintainable, modular, performant, and testable client systems.

• Ensure strong practices for memory and performance optimization, asset management, build pipelines, release management, and platform compatibility.

• Drive high-quality player experiences through close collaboration with product, design, art, QA, and backend teams.

• Oversee client stability, crash reduction, diagnostics, telemetry, and production issue resolution.

Backend Engineering Leadership:

• Lead the design and operation of scalable, reliable, secure, and observable backend services and APIs.

• Guide architecture for distributed systems, data flows, integrations, service ownership, and production operations.

• Promote strong engineering practices in automated testing, CI/CD, monitoring, incident response, performance, and capacity planning.

• Ensure effective collaboration between client and backend teams on API contracts, versioning, data consistency, feature rollout, and backward compatibility.

• Our current backend is primarily PHP. Deep PHP expertise is preferred but not required; strong senior-level backend experience in comparable production environments is acceptable, with the ability and willingness to work effectively in a PHP ecosystem.