Twinkl Educational Publishing
Games Engineering Manager
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Games Engineering Manager
Location: UK Remote with visits to our Sheffield HQ a minimum of 6 times a year
About Twinkl
We're here to help those who teach. It's what brings us to work every day. At Twinkl, we’ve been providing educators across the world with high quality, trusted teaching and learning resources for over a decade now. They’re all written and checked by our wonderful team of experienced educators, and there are hundreds of thousands of resources to download, with new ones added daily.
About the Games Team & Digital Products Area
The digital products area is dedicated to creating innovative and engaging digital experiences for children and educators. We are committed to enriching the lives of users through interactive and educational applications that inspire creativity, learning, and fun. It’s within this area that the Games Team sits.
We are seeking an experienced Games Engineering Manager with strong technical acumen to lead, coach, and empower our game engineering team. We are currently rebuilding our game library from the ground up. An exciting opportunity to set new standards in quality, delivery, and reusability across a large catalog of educational games.
Our games are developed primarily in Defold for WebGL targeting both desktop and mobile (while continually exploring modern web-game and cross-platform technologies). In this role, you will lead the engineering team through technical direction and architecture, drive robust delivery processes, embed operational telemetry, and foster a high-performing, growth-oriented culture.
Ongoing projects/how you’ll spend your day:
- Drive Predictable Delivery & Project Execution: Take full ownership of engineering delivery management across our game roadmap. You’ll oversee sprint planning, resource allocation, capacity management, and delivery pipelines to ensure high-quality games are shipped predictably, efficiently, and on schedule. You’ll proactively identify and mitigate technical and operational risks to keep projects moving smoothly.
- Provide Technical Leadership & Architectural Oversight: Serve as a technically grounded leader who stays close to the code and technology. You will guide the team through complex architectural decisions, system design choices, engine evaluations, and technical debt management, ensuring our game systems remain scalable, modular, and reusable.
- Champion Operational Excellence & Portfolio Telemetry: Champion production reliability across a broad and growing catalog of games. You will drive the implementation and management of client-side telemetry, crash tracking, and performance monitoring dashboards to ensure the team has real-time visibility into live game health, load times, and runtime stability.
- Lead, Coach, and Scale Engineers: Line-manage a team of game software engineers, supporting their professional growth through regular 1-on-1s, technical coaching, clear career progression frameworks, and performance management. You’ll foster an environment of ownership, psychological safety, and technical craftsmanship.
- Cross-Functional Partnership & Tech Strategy: Partner closely with Product Managers, Designers, and Data Analysts to shape the games product roadmap. You will translate product goals into actionable technical strategies, helping non-technical stakeholders understand technical trade-offs, scope, and feasibility.
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To succeed in the role, you will:
- Be a Technically Grounded Game Leader: You bring hands-on experience in game development (using Defold, Unity or similar modern game engines). You possess strong technical literacy in game architecture, WebGL constraints, asset pipelines, and cross-platform deployment, allowing you to effectively challenge, support, and guide senior engineers in technical discussions.
- Be Proficient at Execution & Delivery: You are passionate about delivery management and operational throughput. You know how to structure agile workflows, break down massive initiatives into deliverable milestones, unblock engineers, and deliver complex multi-game roadmaps with high predictability.
- Foster a Culture of Operational Excellence: You understand that shipping a game is only half the battle. You hold high standards for live observability, telemetry, and monitoring, ensuring our games portfolio runs fast, error-free, and reliably across all target devices.
- Foster Cross-Functional Collaboration: Lead collaboration across teams, working effectively with product managers, designers, engineers, and other stakeholders. Communicate clearly and effectively, both verbally and in writing, to share the vision, provide constructive feedback, and document processes for clarity and alignment.
- Show Leadership and Mentorship: Act as a mentor and role model for game engineers, guiding their technical growth and fostering a culture of ownership and accountability. Take the lead on key projects, setting high standards for quality, performance, and best practices in game engineering.
- Drive Adaptability and Resilience: Thrive in a fast-paced, dynamic environment, adeptly managing shifting priorities and requirements. Instil adaptability and resilience within the team, promoting flexibility and a growth-oriented mindset.
- Champion Domain Expertise in Education: Develop a deep understanding of Twinkl’s mission and the unique challenges within the educational domain. Use this knowledge to make informed decisions that align with Twinkl’s goals and support educators and learners effectively.
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You’ll work with:
- The technology team: product, engineering, design, UXR, and Data.
We're interested in people that have:
- Proven experience as an Engineering Manager, Tech Lead, or Lead Game Engineer managing game engineering teams.
- Strong technical background in game development.
- Demonstrated track record of delivery management and in shipping games predictably using Agile methodologies.
- Experience overseeing or implementing client-side telemetry, observability, and error-monitoring systems (e.g., Sentry) across a portfolio of games.
- Deep understanding of game software architecture, WebGL/browser performance constraints, asset pipelines, and cross-platform delivery.
- Proven ability to guide the creation of clean, maintainable, and reusable code patterns specifically for game systems.
- Experience mentoring game engineers and reviewing code for game-specific performance and quality.
- Proven track record of actively supporting team career development by managing engineers’ performance through mentorship and coaching.
- Excellent communication and stakeholder management skills, with the ability to bridge technical engineering concepts with product/business strategy.
Nice to Have:
- Experience in educational technology, serious games, or products targeting young audiences.
- Experience managing multi-game or library-based production pipelines.
- Familiarity with CI/CD paradigms and automated build pipelines for game engine deployments.
- Experience with Defold game engine.
If you require a reasonable adjustment to the application/selection process to enable you to demonstrate your ability to perform the job requirements please include this at the foot of your covering letter. This will help us to understand any modifications we may need to make to support you throughout our selection process.
In return for everything you can bring, we can offer you an exciting role in a fast-growing and dynamic business, with plenty of career opportunities.
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