Principal Data Analyst

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:

Words With Friends Instant is seeking a Principal Data Analyst to be the analytics owner for the game: the person product, design, and engineering come to for data on player behavior, feature health, experimentation, and game strategy. As part of our analytics team, you'll play a crucial role in shaping the future of our game through data-driven insights.

Here's how you'll shape the player experience:

• Product Strategy: Analyze long and short-term trends to deliver insights that influence product direction
• Experimentation: Design statistically sound experiments that drive measurable impact
• Business Intelligence: Maintain comprehensive dashboards and ETL pipelines to keep the organization informed on game performance

What You'll Do :

• Collaborate with the Product team to enhance revenue, retention, and engagement metrics. This includes conducting A/B testing, performing insights analysis, and developing dashboards.
• Analyze player behavior to understand motivations and preferences, partnering with other disciplines to translate findings into actionable experience improvements.
• Communicate findings and recommendations to senior and executive stakeholders, translating complex analyses into clear decisions and influencing product and game strategy at the leadership level.
• Support the team in tuning the different features in the game to optimize for long term game and feature health
• Design and maintain ETL pipelines to extract, transform, and load data from multiple sources, ensuring source of truth for analyses and business intelligence.
• Design game telemetry to capture meaningful player interaction data to improve the game experience.
• Actively play and engage with our games to maintain first-hand understanding of player experience, game mechanics, and potential pain points.
• Monitor and maintain the integrity of a wide range of tools and models used to streamline workflows and personalize the player experience, in collaboration with other data analysts and scientists on the team.
• Participate in and contribute to the Analytics Org’s AI initiative, which aims to significantly increase each analyst’s impact through the power of LLMs
• Continuously learn about analytics best practices, and actively share and promote these practices across various games and teams.

What You Bring :

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Mathematics, Statistics, Economics, or a related quantitative field. Advanced degrees (Masters or PhD) are a plus.
• Minimum of 8 years in data science or analytics roles, preferably with 6 years in a Product Data Science or Gaming Analytics team
• Demonstrated experience guiding product teams through complex decisions and analyses and dealing with ambiguous data
• Proficiency in Python and SQL.
• Demonstrated experience in data visualization, statistical analysis, and machine learning.
• Familiarity with Business Intelligence (BI) tools like Tableau and version control systems such as Git is advantageous.
• Strong ability in both written and oral communication.
• Highly self-motivated with a keen interest in problem-solving.
• Willingness to take ownership of challenges.
• Proven ability to work collaboratively as part of a team.
• Strong communication skills - you can explain complex data in simple, actionable terms
• Familiarity with AI/ML concepts or experience in automating recurring analytics workflows is a plus

Bonus Points :

Experience in gaming, mobile, or consumer tech industries.

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 [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, take2games.com, naturalmotion.com, smallgiantgames.com, themavens.com, gram.gs email domain).