Principal Technical Designer

Title: Principal Technical Designer Location: US - United States

Scopely is looking for a top-performing Principal Technical Designer to join our design organization remotely within the US or hybrid in our Culver City hub.

At Scopely, we care deeply about what we do and want to inspire play every day — whether in our work environments alongside our talented colleagues or through our deep connections with our communities of players. We are a global team of game lovers who are developing, publishing and innovating the mobile games industry, connecting millions of people around the world daily.

As Principal Technical Designer, you will sit between game designers and the full stack that carries their content from authoring to the player: Tools (the designer interface), Engine (how the game consumes data), and Infrastructure (how data is stored and delivered), and make sure designers are set up to build content quickly, safely, and at scale. You will turn how designers actually work into clear requirements for Tools, and build the templates, data structures, validation, and standards that let great ideas become shipped content without waiting on an engineer. Your hands-on work and expertise will unlock the team of designers to create more compelling content for our players, deliver it much more quickly, and eliminate points of friction throughout the process.

What you will do:

• Own the content workflow experience for game designers, from first idea through live content, and raise it to a standard where authoring is fast, safe, and a pleasure.
• Bridge game designers and the full data stack: turn designer pain points into clear, prioritized requirements for Tools, Engine, and Infrastructure, and translate their constraints back into practical guidance.
• Measure how designers work today (iteration time, hand-offs, engineer-assist requests, content defects) and remove the biggest sources of friction.
• Partner with Tools, Engine, and Infrastructure to specify authoring tools, data schemas, validation, and delivery, and act as the first and most demanding user during prototyping and rollout.
• Build the technical foundations designers rely on: reusable templates, data architectures, and scripts that let designers create and tune content without code changes.
• Own content architecture across projects: define how content is structured, authored, versioned, and delivered so teams share one coherent model instead of rebuilding per title.
• Define and enforce content authoring standards for naming, data structure, documentation, and review, with validation that catches errors at authoring time rather than in QA or live.
• Set the workflow and tooling strategy for the design organization: decide which workflows deserve investment and shape the roadmap with Tools, Engine, and Infrastructure leadership.
• Serve as craft lead for technical design: set the discipline's standards and hiring bar, mentor designers and technical designers, and lead the team through transitions to new tooling.
• Form small cross-discipline embedded workflow teams (design, tools, engineering) aimed at the highest-friction workflows, and partner with Art, UX, QA, and Live Ops so pipelines hold from authoring through release.
• Envision content workflows that sustain a large live-operated game, with scalable quality, velocity, and cost.

What you will need:

• 8+ years in technical design, systems design, or tools-facing design roles on shipped games
• Demonstrated experience partnering with tools, engine, and backend teams to define authoring tools, content pipelines, or data-driven workflows end to end
• A track record of measurably improving designer iteration time or content throughput, including leading cross-discipline workflow efforts at scale (embedded teams, tooling migrations, or content architecture)
• Strong scripting and data skills (for example Python, C#, Lua, visual scripting, spreadsheets, JSON, SQL) and the judgment to know when to build, configure, or ask Engineering
• Deep understanding of data-driven design: config tables, schemas, templates, and validation, and how data is consumed by the engine and stored and delivered from the backend
• Experience on live-operated or content-heavy games where content velocity and quality both matter
• Strong communication and the ability to set standards and priorities across multiple teams without direct authority

Bonus Points:

• Experience building or owning internal authoring tools, or designing workflows for creator or user-generated-content tools
• Experience working directly in Unity, including custom editors and data-driven asset workflows
• 3+ years working in Free to Play
• Experience on cross-platform products, and console / PC games