Director of Engineering

Welcome to the world of land-based gaming. At Light & Wonder, it's all about the games, and our Gaming team builds cutting-edge technology, products, and content for the most iconic casinos and operators across the globe.

We are seeking a Director of Engineering to lead a high-performing team responsible for developing and delivering core game development technologies and tools that empower our studios to create world-class gaming experiences. This role provides hands-on technical leadership, organizational management, and strategic direction within a key area of our technology organization.

The Director of Engineering will partner with product, platform, and compliance teams to ensure our solutions are scalable, efficient, and aligned with both business objectives and regulatory requirements. This leader will play a critical role in building a culture of technical excellence, innovation, and continuous improvement.

Essential Job Functions:

Technical & Business Leadership

• Define and govern a multi-year engineering strategy and roadmap that supports global business goals, product evolution, and modernization objectives.

• Oversee the design, development, and evolution of game development technologies to support high-performance game creation.

• Stay ahead of market trends, emerging tools, and regulatory requirements, incorporating them into the team's strategy.

• Collaborate with internal game studios, platform teams, and business stakeholders to align technical solutions with business needs.

• Advocate for engineering best practices, ensuring robust, maintainable, and scalable systems.

Team Leadership & Organization Growth

• Hire, mentor, and lead a high-performing team, fostering a culture of technical excellence and innovation.

• Create a culture of accountability, innovation, and collaboration-driving engagement and shared ownership across the engineering organization.

• Set clear goals and development plans for team members, enabling career growth and continuous learning.

• Ensure the team operates efficiently using Agile methodologies, optimizing workflows for high-impact delivery.

• Drive cross-functional collaboration, ensuring strong partnerships with product, QA, and compliance teams.

• Ensure engineering teams operate with clear priorities, measurable outcomes, and strong alignment to product and platform objectives.

Technology & Architecture Oversight

• Provide technical leadership in the development of game development frameworks, tools, and supporting systems.

• Establish modern software architecture patterns, ensuring flexibility, scalability, and maintainability.

• Oversee the adoption of best practices in software development, including CI/CD. Automated testing, and DevOps strategies.

• Ensure seamless integration between game development tools and existing pipelines used by game studios.

Risk Management & Compliance

• Identify and mitigate technical risks early in the design process, ensuring long-term stability.

• Ensure adherence to industry compliance standards, particularly within regulated gambling markets.

• Implement security best practices, ensuring stable and secure development environments.

This role is hybrid, with 3 days a week on-site reporting to our office based in Chicago, IL.

Training and/or Experience

• Proven Experience: Minimum 8 years in software engineering, with at least 5 years in leadership roles managing engineering teams.

• Technical Expertise: Strong experience in game development technologies, ideally with Unity and C#/.NET

• Software Development Processes: Deep understanding of Agile methodologies, DevOps, CI/CD pipelines, and software engineering best practices.

• Software Architecture: Strong knowledge of software design patterns, modularity, and performance optimization.

• Leadership & Mentorship: Proven track record of hiring, mentoring, and growing engineering teams.

• Collaboration & Communication: Ability to work cross-functionally with product, platform, QA, and compliance teams.

Knowledge, Skills and Abilities:

• Passion for gaming technology: Strong understanding of game development workflows, tools, and real-time engines.

• Hybrid system architecture experience: Familiarity with cloud based and on premises solutions, ensuring scalable and flexible deployment strategies.

• Knowledge of game telemetry and analytics: Understanding of real-time player insights, such as telemetry, heat mapping, and behavior analytics, and how they inform decision making.

• Experience with multi-platform development: Knowledge of challenges and solutions in building portable, high-performance software across different hardware and software ecosystems.

• Continuous improvement mindset: A track record of driving modernization initiatives, optimizing workflows, and improving development processes.

• Regulatory & Compliance Understanding: Familiarity with the gambling industry regulations is a plus.

• Passion for Innovation: Active in seeking out emerging technologies, with proven experience of applying them to applications in a gaming context.

Education:

Bachelor's or master's degree in computer science or related field, or equivalent work experience required; Master's degree preferred.

Physical Requirements:

The physical demands described here are representative of those that must be met by an employee to successfully perform the essential functions of this job. Reasonable accommodations may be made to enable individuals with disabilities to perform the essential functions. While performing the duties of this job, the employee is regularly required to sit, stand, walk, bend, use hands, operate a computer, and have specific vision abilities to include close and distance vision, and ability to adjust focus working with computer and business equipment.

Work Conditions:

The work conditions are representative and typical of similar jobs in comparable organization

Light & Wonder is an Equal Opportunity Employer and does not discriminate against applicants due to race, color, sex, age, national origin, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity, status as a veteran, and basis of disability or any other federal, state or local protected class. If you'd like more information about your equal employment opportunity rights as an applicant under the law, please click here for EEOC Poster.