Engineering Manager, Core Services — Lead Distributed Team

Zynga; Austin (TX); On-site; USD 150,000 - 230,000; Full time

Job summary

Zynga is seeking an Engineering Manager to lead a newly formed Core Services team within its Central Technology group. This role can be based in Austin, Chicago, or Toronto and will oversee a distributed group delivering central services across games.

You will drive project scoping, mentor engineers, and set technical standards while balancing live service maintenance with forward‑looking refactors. Strong backend, Java/Golang, and AWS experience are essential.

Qualifications

• 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

Responsibilities

• Define and scope projects with engineers.
• Manage a pod of engineers daily, including morale and career growth.
• 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 with updates and forward‑looking enhancements and refactoring initiatives.

Skills

Engineering mgmt

Software engineer

Roadmaps

Mentorship

Distributed teams

Low-latency AWS

Java

Golang

Kubernetes

IaC

Learning of new tech

Communication

Education

B.Sc. in Computer Science / Engineering or equivalent

Tools

Kubernetes

Terraform

Helm

Datadog

CI/CD

Java

Go (Golang)

Job description

Zynga is seeking an Engineering Manager to lead a newly formed Core Services team within its Central Technology group. This role can be based in Austin, Chicago, or Toronto and will oversee a distributed group delivering central services across games.

You will drive project scoping, mentor engineers, and set technical standards while balancing live service maintenance with forward‑looking refactors. Strong backend, Java/Golang, and AWS experience are essential.