Senior Manager, Player

About Us

is one of the largest gaming sites in the world and the #1 platform for playing, learning, and enjoying chess.

We are a team of 600+ fully remote people in 60+ countries working hard to serve the global chess community. We are here to support 250M+ chess players worldwide with the best possible product, content, and tools to serve the community!

We are a tech company. A gaming company. A content company. And we do it all with passion and commitment to the game. Above all we prize our mission‑driven, flat, life‑celebrating, no‑corporate culture, and we look forward to meeting you and learning more about what you can bring to the team.

First off, you're an expert at user research and you care deeply about chess and the people who play it. You know our products well, or you'll dive in hard to get there, and you can't use them without noticing the moments where a real person would get stuck, confused, or quietly give up. You'd rather watch one real player struggle through a flow than read ten dashboards about it.

You believe a funnel chart tells you where players drop, but only watching a real human hit that wall tells you why, and makes you care enough to do something about it. You think from first principles, you get curious before you get to solutions, and you have a gift for getting a stranger to tell you what they're actually feeling.

This role exists to make our products serve real people, not just experiment metrics. You are the company's clearest window into the actual human experience of using , and your job is to keep that experience honest, felt, and acted upon across the whole organization. You'll work closely with senior leadership, including the CEO and CGO, and it's on you to figure out how to reach into product, design, data, research, and community to drive change.

The breadth is the point. You'll stand up and lead the user research function, managing a small, hands‑on team directly and extending your reach far wider through the people you influence, not just the ones who report to you.

• Get inside the experience of real players. Spend real time watching actual players, and people who aren't players yet, use our products. Not the hypothetical user in a planning doc, the real person sitting there delighted or lost. You do this work yourself, and just as importantly you get other leaders and teams doing it too, because nothing replaces seeing it with your own eyes.
• Close the loop, don't just generate insight. Find the friction, get it to the people who own the surface, and then go back and watch real players hit the improved flow to confirm it actually got better. You're accountable for the outcome, not just the writeup. A complete loop, observe to fix to re‑observe to share, becomes the template the rest of the org can copy.
• Make sure every kind of player has a seat at the table. Cover the full journey, from chess aware and chess curious to chess player, chess improver, and chess community member, so we don't sharpen the experience for one group while quietly breaking it for another. Keep a living roster of real, memorable players across that journey that product and marketing teams can picture, point to, and literally talk to when they need a gut check.
• Turn signal into action across the company. Synthesize what you see into concrete, undeniable findings and get them in front of the right owners. Pull from every channel, support tickets, app reviews, forums, and social, and connect the dots into themes the company can act on, sharing what's net‑new rather than what's already known.
• Spread the mindset. This is not a solo function. Get leaders, PMs, and anyone who shapes the product to watch real players themselves, because a person who has personally seen a player get stuck makes different decisions forever after. You are the evangelist for player empathy company‑wide.
• Own the experience. You're the company's advocate for the real player. You won't ship the fixes yourself, you partner with the PMs and engineers who do, but you bring findings that are concrete and impossible to ignore and stay on it until the product is genuinely better. How you reach into…