Development Manager
The Opportunity
As a Development Manager at Hyper Hippo, you will be the driving force behind keeping our projects on track, ensuring teams have the resources and support needed to create engaging gaming experiences. You will bring organization, clarity, and momentum to the development process, working closely with Producers, Team Leads, and company leadership to align goals, balance workloads, and optimize workflows. Your ability to keep things running smoothly will be key to delivering high-quality games on time.
In addition to managing development processes, you will play a crucial role in communication and collaboration across the company. You will keep leadership informed on project status and help integrate Data and Marketing requests into development, ensuring these needs are met without disrupting production. If you enjoy turning complex challenges into smooth workflows and helping teams thrive, this could be the perfect opportunity for you.
A Development Manager’s Impact
- Collaborate with the team and leadership to define and maintain a 4-6 month roadmap, ensuring high-level scoping, validated capacity analysis, and milestone tracking in Jira.
- Oversee sprint planning, backlog grooming, and task management, ensuring tasks are well-defined, estimated, and properly assigned to maintain development efficiency.
- Monitor team workload daily to prevent over- or under-allocation, unblock team members as needed, and identify high or low performance for producer escalation.
- Work with the team to define release schedules, track progress, and conduct postmortem reviews after challenging sprints or releases to drive continuous improvement.
- Champion the team’s Agile methodology, promote best practices, and ensure relevant KPIs are collected and shared with stakeholders.
- Provide guidance and mentorship to team members, fostering growth and leadership within the organization.
- Leveraging the AI tools built into our project management platforms to automate manual and repetitive tasks.
- Significant experience in project management, development management, or a related field within the mobile gaming industry.
- Proven experience managing roadmaps, sprints, and milestone tracking in an Agile or Scrum environment.
- Expertise with Jira, Confluence, and other project management tools.
- Strong communication and leadership skills, with the ability to align cross-functional teams.
- Experience working with game development teams, including engineers, designers, and product managers.
- Passion for fostering a positive, transparent, and balanced work culture.
- Preference given to candidates with prior experience in a live-ops gaming environment.
- Familiarity with data-driven decision-making and integrating marketing requirements into development cycles.
- Certification in Agile, Scrum, or other project management methodologies.
- Competitive salary and extraordinary incentive plan tied to company goals
- Extended health, dental & vision benefits + a $600 health & wellness spending account + an Employee & Family Assistance Program
- 4 weeks vacation + paid winter holiday closure + 10 paid personal/sick days per year
- Annual $3,000 self development budget + 5 paid professional development days to attend conferences, courses, training – you name it!
- Home Ergonomic Benefit for your home office - $1,000 + company laptop (choice of PC or Mac!) and accessories required to work effectively
- Paid parental and compassionate caregiver leave
- Charitable gift matching up to $1,000 per year for recognized causes that you support + 3 paid volunteer days per year