Head of Product Development

Appodeal is looking for a Head of Product Development to lead the full ownership of both product and engineering across our mobile gaming business unit — WordMaker, Solitaire, and Brick Blast.

This is a single leadership role that owns both product and engineering across Appodeal's mobile gaming portfolio. The Head of Product Development operates as a player-coach: shipping work alongside the team, setting the bar by example, and growing people through proximity — not through management layers.

This is not a director role. It's the most senior hands-on contributor in the department who also happens to own the direction. We are looking for someone who has built and shipped at the intersection of product and engineering in mobile gaming, is deeply AI-native, and is energized by ownership without guardrails.

---

What You Own

Product Direction

• Define and evolve the product strategy for the games portfolio — grounded in eProfit outcomes.
• Own the quality of PRDs, roadmap decisions, and product hypotheses across the team. Write them yourself on the highest-priority bets.
• Maintain live knowledge of product metrics across the portfolio: retention, ARPU, ARPDAU, experiment results. Stay in the data daily.

Technical Direction

• Own the full technical architecture of the product department — game clients (Unity), backend systems, release pipeline, and internal tooling.
• Define engineering standards, development workflows, and code quality bar across the team.
• Ensure reliability, performance, and scalability of all systems supporting the games portfolio.

AI as an Operating Layer

• Drive AI adoption across both product and engineering functions — from PRD generation and competitive research to test automation, release pipeline, and analytics agents.
• Build and iterate on the intelligence layer that replaces manual coordination and reporting: analytics agents, QA agents, LiveOps automation, reporting pipelines.
• Continuously improve development velocity through AI tooling and process optimization (e.g., Copilot, GPT-based workflows, GitHub Actions automation).

Hands-On Delivery

• Personally contribute to both product work (specs, experiments, analysis) and engineering work (architecture decisions, code review, shipping core systems) — not one delegated to the other.
• Lead by doing on the highest-stakes initiatives. The team should be able to follow your PRDs and your pull requests.
• Participate in debugging, optimization, and solving complex technical challenges alongside the team.

Team and Culture

• Lead, develop, and grow a lean team of Product Owners and ICs (Unity engineers, backend developers, design, QA).
• Set a high bar for ownership, speed, and AI fluency. Address performance gaps directly.
• Foster a culture where people act as DRIs, not ticket-resolvers.
• Grow engineers into independent, high-impact contributors and tech leads.

Cross-Functional

• Work closely with monetization, UA, data, and RnD departments to ensure portfolio decisions are grounded in full eProfit context.
• Enable fast hypothesis testing and iteration cycles within product teams.
• Partner with product and data teams to build scalable systems for experimentation, analytics, and performance tracking.
• Coordinate the RnD department → internal team handover process and maintain hit-readiness and de-handover criteria.

---

Requirements

Must-Have

1. 8+ years of software engineering experience, including senior leadership roles in mobile gaming or mobile product environments.
2. Genuine hands-on in both product and engineering — you write PRDs and you write code. Not one delegated to someone else.
3. Strong expertise in Unity (C#) and mobile game architecture; solid understanding of scalable backend systems and client-server architecture.
4. AI-native, not AI-curious — you have concrete production examples of AI tools accelerating your output. You don't describe it in theory; you show it.
5. Leadership by proximity — you have led small, high-performance teams in a fast-moving environment. You grow people by working alongside them, not by reviewing their work from a distance.
6. Data-driven mindset — experience working in environments with frequent experimentation cycles, A/B testing, and metric-driven decision-making.

Strong Signals

• Founded or co-founded a mobile gaming studio.
• Have directly scaled an ad-monetized casual game from early traction to meaningful portfolio revenue.
• Have built internal tooling, automation pipelines, or SDK integrations alongside product work.
• Experience with CI/CD pipelines, automated testing, and release processes (Unity Cloud Build, GitHub Actions).
• Familiarity with analytics tools: Firebase, GameAnalytics, Amplitude.
• Experience with mobile game monetization systems (ads, IAP).

---

Why Join Us?

• Ownership without guardrails. You set the direction for both product and engineering — no committee, no layers.
• Real products, real traction. WordMaker, Solitaire, and Brick Blast are live, growing games with real users and data to work with.
• AI-first environment. We are building the next generation of mobile games with AI at the core of how we develop, test, and iterate.
• Lean, high-trust team. Small team, fast decisions, high impact per person.
• Competitive compensation. Competitive salary, performance-based bonuses, and clear career growth opportunities.

---

We believe in the following values, and hope you do too:

• Leverage data to build product. We rely on data to make informed decisions and create products that solve real problems. While data guides us, we apply insight, context, and wisdom to interpret it thoughtfully.
• We work together to serve others. Collaboration is at the heart of everything we do. By serving others — customers, teammates, and stakeholders — we create value and build trust.
• Relentless pursuit of excellence. We commit to grow and evolve in everything we do, constantly seeking opportunities to refine our processes, skills, and results.
• Passionate curiosity fuels perseverance. Passionate curiosity drives us to explore challenges, learn from setbacks, and adapt with resilience.
• Direct and straightforward, no politics. Transparency and honesty are essential. We communicate clearly, focus on facts, and avoid unnecessary politics or hidden agendas.
• Lean startup mentality: start small, iterate quickly. We prioritize experimentation, fast learning, resourcefulness, agility, and innovation.
• Ownership and accountability. Everyone is empowered to take ownership of their work. We are accountable for our decisions, actions, and outcomes.