Lead Game Designer

ubic Games is a game development studio within the GDEV holding. We’ve grown from a small team into a leading game studio with 120+ specialists. Our mission is to create unique pixel-style games — including Pixel Gun 3D, played by 5M+ monthly active users.

We’re looking for a Lead Game Designer for Pixel Gun 3D — someone who will own game design quality and drive product growth through LiveOps, economy, and meta systems. This role has real impact on strategy, decisions, and key metrics.

Responsibilities

• Lead the game design team: task management, quality control, coaching and growth.

• Build and roll out design standards: templates for Event Specs, GDD/feature docs, required blocks for goals, metrics, hypotheses, and parameters.

• Establish clear processes: Definition of Ready, decomposition standards, and a consistent approach to task and document reviews.

• Design, improve, and maintain gameplay and meta systems: progression, core loop, meta loop, and LiveOps events.

• Turn LiveOps into a scalable system (not a set of one-offs).

• Own the in-game economy: reward budgets, difficulty, time-to-complete, progression; validate events and features against economic constraints.

• Support and grow monetization: identify growth opportunities and implement economy/monetization solutions based on data.

• Own features end-to-end: goals, hypotheses, documentation, development support, post-release analysis and iteration.

• Contribute to product vision and strategic decisions for the game.

• Work closely with Analytics, Marketing, Engineering, and Product Management.

• Introduce AI and automation into the team workflow: document drafts, parameterization, economy checks, prompt library, team enablement.

• Define requirements and use cases for a new configuration tool and update standards accordingly.

• Run regular post-release reviews: root-cause analysis, standards updates, and prevention of repeat issues.

• Maintain key documentation (GDDs, specs, Event Specs, economic frameworks).

Requirements

• 5+ years in game development, including 3+ years in economy/monetization for mobile F2P games.

• Russian level C1 (spoken and written).

• Strong expertise in systemic/meta design, game economy, progression, parameterization, and LiveOps.

• Proven experience leading a game design team: planning, quality, people development, removing bottlenecks.

• Data-driven mindset: define metric goals, analyze events/features, make decisions based on numbers.

• Experience creating and implementing design standards, documentation templates, review and quality-control processes.

• End-to-end feature ownership experience — from idea and documentation to post-release performance evaluation.

• Strong communication skills: clear reasoning, active listening, cross-functional collaboration.

• Strong player mindset and understanding of mobile multiplayer audience behavior (shooters, RTS).

• Ability to find simple, effective solutions to complex product problems.

Nice to have

• Strong partnership model with a PM (Lead owns quality/content/parameters; PM owns timelines/operational cycle).

• Experience building predictable planning processes: DoR, statuses, early risk signals.

• Comfort bringing order to legacy systems and reducing operational chaos from scratch.