Engineering Manager

Zynga Early Careers; Austin (TX); On-site; USD 180,000 - 260,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Benefits package

Job summary

Zynga is seeking an Engineering Manager in the Chicago, Austin or Toronto areas to lead a newly formed Core Services team within our Development and Infrastructure Systems organization in the Central Technology group. Core Services is a small, distributed team with a mix of engineering skill levels that builds and maintains central services critical to Zynga and its games.

The optimal candidate will have 4+ years as an Engineering Manager and hands-on backend experience, guiding the team to

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or related field.
• 4+ years experience as an Engineering Manager.
• 4+ years industry experience as a Software Engineer.
• Ability to build and maintain roadmaps for diverse services.
• Experience mentoring distributed teams and collaborating with stakeholders.
• Hands-on with low-latency, large-scale backend services in AWS.

Responsibilities

• Define and scope projects, oversee timelines and task breakdowns.
• Manage a pod of engineers daily, including career growth and morale.
• Drive technical excellence with the team and lead architecture reviews.
• Monitor and improve engineering processes.
• Balance live services maintenance with forward-looking improvements.

Skills

Team leadership

Roadmap planning

Cross-functional

Mentoring

Communication

Low latency

Education

B.Sc. in Computer Science

Tools

Kubernetes

Terraform

Helm

Datadog

AWS

Java

Golang

Job description

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

Zynga is looking for an Engineering Manager in the Chicago, Austin or Toronto areas to lead a newly formed Core Services team within our larger Development and Infrastructure Systems organization in the Central Technology group. Core Services is a small, distributed team with a mix of engineering skill levels that builds and maintains a number of central services critical to both Central Technology and all games across Zynga.

The optimal candidate will have experience as a senior engineer working on and maintaining large-scale distributed backend services, and at least four years of experience as an Engineering Manager. You will work with the team on a day‑to‑day basis in partnership with the technical lead to ensure timely, high quality outcomes and technical excellence.

What You’ll Do:

• Ensure the team has clearly defined and scoped projects, overseeing timeline scoping and task breakdown with the engineers

• Manage a pod of engineers on the team on a daily basis, both in their tasks as well as morale, career growth and future planning

• Drive standards for technical excellence within the team in partnership with the technical lead

• Review and give feedback to engineering architectures

• Help to monitor and improve engineering process

• Balance maintenance of a wide variety of live services and tools with updates and forward‑looking enhancements and refactoring initiatives.

What You Bring:

• B.Sc. in Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent education / work experience

• 4+ Years experience as an Engineering Manager

• 4+ Years industry experience as a Software Engineer

• Ability to build and maintain roadmaps and schedules for a diverse set of services, balancing support with new projects

• Ability to manage, mentor and lead a distributed team of engineers.

• Able to work collaboratively with engineering stakeholders including production, product, and customer engineering teams.

• Hands‑on experience with low‑latency systems and massive‑scale backend online services infrastructure in an AWS environment

• A background building backend services in modern languages such as Java or Golang, with the depth to give meaningful feedback and mentorship on microservice architecture, API design, and implementation on a large-scale platform.

• Experience with infrastructure‑as‑code and Kubernetes deployments

• Updates knowledge constantly, always seeking to learn about new technologies

• Excellent communication skills

Bonus Points:

• Experience defining and maintaining SLOs for live services

• Experience with test‑driven development and testing frameworks

• Familiar with observability and monitoring platforms such as Datadog

• Experience with JS frameworks, both frontend and backend

• Experience with IaC frameworks such as Terraform and Helm

• Comfortable with low‑level investigation of infrastructure and services

• Mobile development experience with a focus on iOS and/or Android

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 site

Please note that Zynga is unable to provide visa sponsorship or assistance for this position. All candidates must be legally authorized to work in the United States without requiring current or future employer sponsorship.

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 [e-mail] 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 scam 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).