Senior Technical Program Manager – Data Delivery & Governance- Xbox Game Studios - Rare Ltd.

Rare is an Xbox Game Studio creating the kind of games the world doesn’t have. Our values – explorers, evolving, together – are fundamental to the games we make and how we make them. Rare offers rewarding and fulfilling careers for exceptional people, supporting you to learn and grow. Our studio is a welcoming campus in the heart of the Midlands, where the majority of our team work in a flexible hybrid work pattern.

If you love the possibilities that good data can bring and how it can light up opportunities to go be better for your customers. If you are experienced in helping to bring teams together to deliver exciting data solutions and are looking to bring that experience to an exciting, engaging games studio while putting our players at the centre of that impact, this role could be for you!

This role exists to bring clarity to our Analytics and Data Engineering work, while readying the teams to meet future opportunities and challenges.

Working across the two teams, the successful candidate will help shape our data programs, working with the Head of Insights and co-development partner to ensure we are delivering impact consistently and leaning in to help the teams identify and navigate the future landscape.

The ability to understand the studio and title’s priorities and make high-integrity commitments to feed into game roadmaps, with the experience to deliver on this, will be integral to the role. Additionally, ensuring that positive player impact is central to our priorities and delivered as early as possible into players’ hands is critical.

Your ability to develop active partnerships across the studio and communicate effectively will drive increased visibility, bringing clarity to data engineering and analytics work at Rare. This is a chance to have genuine impact that will drive ongoing results in delivering new features and capabilities to our players, while ensuring the long-term success of data insights and engineering in one of the UK’s premier game studios.

Responsibilities

• Work with the analytics team and external co-development partners to bridge gaps, identify and manage priorities and commitments in a multi-title studio.
• Partner with production teams to elevate visibility and player impact of data initiatives.
• Provide program management support to the data function in order to deliver valuable data capabilities and light up insights that provide real value to our game design and engineering teams.
• Work with the data teams to identify future opportunities and challenges, ensuring they are aligned to game strategies. Support the teams’ capability to meet these through effective prioritisation and identification of skill gaps, and ensure teams are the right size to meet the needs of the studio.
• Break down complex data engineering initiatives into iterative deliverables to provide value to our players earlier in the process.
• Support teams with insight and confidence in making high-integrity commitments to partner teams.
• Proactively identify inefficiencies that are holding the team back, and drive better, more efficient workflows.
• Bring order to and own data governance and compliance initiatives for the studio (sometimes stepping outside of data systems to do this) with support from the director. Build executive-level visibility and accountability for these strategic programmes.
• Be an active participant and contributor to the Xbox Game Studios ecosystem.
  
  

Qualifications

Required Skills and Experience

• Prior work history as a program/project manager or engineer with a focus on data for shipped software products or services.
• Experience of working on complex projects.
• Utilisation of a growth mindset when faced with challenges.
• Ability to collaborate effectively across organisational boundaries, build relationships and bring in ideas to achieve broader organisational goals.
• Experience of compliance and governance programs, with proven ability to bring order to a diverse competing set of priorities and provide executive-level visibility and engagement.
  
  

Desirable Skills And Experience

• Experience of live service games and their unique technical requirements and opportunities.
• Team leadership experience.
• Experience of putting the customer experience at the centre of the engineering landscape.
• Passionate about player experience.
  
  

Please note that if you read through this description and don’t tick all the boxes but still think you’d be a good fit for the role, please do get in touch. We are always keen to hear from promising candidates, even where their experience may not quite mirror that which is listed.

Microsoft is an equal opportunity employer. Consistent with applicable law, all qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to age, ancestry, citizenship, color, family or medical care leave, gender identity or expression, genetic information, immigration status, marital status, medical condition, national origin, physical or mental disability, political affiliation, protected veteran or military status, race, ethnicity, religion, sex (including pregnancy), sexual orientation, or any other characteristic protected by applicable local laws, regulations and ordinances. If you need assistance and/or a reasonable accommodation due to a disability during the application process, read more about requesting accommodations.