Director of Production

At Kabam, we’re constantly raising the bar of excellence in free-to-play gaming. We hire for passion and diversity so that we can triumph in our collective skill. Our teams are made up of a fusion of personalities and interests bound together by a collaborative nature, fun-loving culture, and a drive to do what it takes to make great games. And this is where you come in...

The Director of Production owns the "How" for Marvel Contest of Champions including the plan, cadence, and quality by which the game ships, from build through test and release. Product owns the "Why" and Game Direction owns the "What";
Production turns both into shipped work at a predictable cadence and a known level of quality, and holds the final call on whether a release goes out. QA and Release Management report into this role, along with the Development Directors embedded across the live, core, specialist and art pipeline teams.

This role is a full-time, on-site position based 5 days a week at our Downtown Vancouver studio.

• Own one delivery plan across live and core work that other disciplines price and build against.
• Establish and improve the studio's delivery methods, tooling and quality gates.
• Own the quality bar and hold go / no-go on every release; QA and Release Management report into this role.
• Own external development: partner scopes, SLAs, outsourcing budgets and vendor performance.
• Lead capacity, headcount and delivery-cost planning, kept aligned to the commercial plan.
• Balance delivery output against team health to hold business outcomes.

• Owner of the Production team; member of the game leads group and studio senior leadership.
• Mentors the Production discipline and the QA and Release craft owners; runs 1:1s, hiring, onboarding and reviews.
• Partners across Product, Live Service, Game Direction, Core Development, Art, Tech and UX, and with People, Resource Management and Finance on planning.
• Brings the delivery position into senior forums in a form leadership can act on, including the version people would rather not hear.
• Works with the Product and Live Design leads to reach one agreed delivery position, and champions the organisational changes the model needs.
• Anticipates delivery and business risk early and reallocates capacity to hold priorities.

• Owns capacity, scoping, sequencing, dependencies and risk end to end; names single points of failure and their cover.
• Owns the trade-off when scope grows against a fixed date, bringing options to cut, move or add so the date and quality bar do not move by accident.
• Ultimately accountable for quality; a QA Lead owns test strategy, standards, tooling and the escape rate day to day.
• Drives quality in at source: developer testing, code-review standards and automated regression with a CI merge gate.
• Owns the release train, store submission and certification, and the hotfix and rollback runbook.
• Holds go / no-go against a defined release bar (crash-free rate, ANR, severity thresholds) that protects the live player experience.
• Drives AI-assisted delivery and QA tooling where it improves throughput and predictability.

• Responsible for the delivery, headcount and outsourcing budget for the game, kept aligned to commercial targets.
• Allocates delivery capacity across the live, core, specialist and art pipeline teams.
• Protects the capacity ring fenced for roadmap development so live demands do not erode it.

• Bachelor's degree or higher, with a specialization in production, delivery, engineering management or a related discipline.
• Strong grasp of the technologies behind game development, with their capabilities and limits.
• 10+ years in games or entertainment development and production, with 5+ years leading, in a mid or large studio.
• 7+ years in a product development role; shipped at least one title through the full cycle, including live production.
• Direct experience across concept, pre-production, production and live production, and of managing QA, release and external partners on a live-service title.
• Transformative…