Job Details
Data Scientist - Game Studio

King - Barcelona

Posted 5 months ago Apply Now!

Job Description

We are looking for a skilled and creative Data Scientist interested in building, defining and pushing the boundaries of games analytics within our Barcelona studio, focusing on our live game Candy Crush Soda Saga. You’ll have a proven ability to apply your skills, be it technical, behavioural or economic, in order to generate value for the studio's new generation of awesome mobile games.

Your role within our Kingdom

If you want to improve the experience of King’s 260 million players across our network of games, then this may be the right opportunity for you. You’ll help us to further understand, model, predict, segment and retain our players. You will be part of a community of 80+ business intelligence & analytics experts, while working on a daily basis in smaller teams. As a data scientist at King, your role will be focused on particular games, our network or specific business areas.

Specifically, you’ll:

  • Identify potential business opportunities and scope/design approaches to capture those opportunities
  • Translate business needs to technical requirements and AB- tests, then work with development teams to ensure correct implementation and tracking
  • Develop an analysis strategy and perform analysis of complex scenarios and AB- tests, both systematically and on a one- off basis.
  • Carefully check, debug, and problem solve issues to ensure you deliver accurate and clear analysis and reports, even when confronted by subtle data complications
  • Provide an analytics perspective to discussions and helping to drive the priorities within your team
  • Be the pro- active owner of the entire data chain for your game(s)

Skills to create thrills

You have a passion for quantitative analysis, understanding player behaviour and will have the ability to draw business insights which will add real value to King. You will need to demonstrate the ability to learn quickly and will have worked in a fast paced and collaborative environment. This role will involve working with teams and individuals across King - such as Game Developers, Business Performance Managers and Marketeers, so excellent communication skills are essential.

While we certainly don’t expect you to have all of these skills from day one, we do expect you to learn and develop in each of the following five areas:

  • Business Insight: The ability to understand the problems and issues our games and business wants to solve, and then defining the right data, analysis or interpretation to lead to the right recommendations and decisions
  • Player behavior: Understanding the players’ motivation is key to design valuable tests and interpret results
  • SQL: The ability to write complex SQL queries to analyse our databases with 300+ million players, and work effectively with both Hive and relational database systems
  • Analytical coding: Using tools such as R, Python (and also Excel) for analytical purposes
  • Stats: Understanding the appropriate statistical techniques to use in different circumstances
  • Communication: Designing good ways of communicating, visualising or reporting your results/analysis so they are clear and unambiguous
  • There is plenty of scope at King for you to learn from your colleagues in the areas where you have less experience, and to share your own skills where you are stronger.

Specific experience that might be helpful, but is not required, includes: experience in the games industry or similarly sophisticated customer- facing digital businesses; experience in "big data" systems such as Hadoop, Hive; experience in behavioural psychology/economics; robust understanding of more advanced statistical techniques suitable for analysis of highly skewed populations; experience in predictive analytics, segmentation, and related areas; experience in experimental design; software engineering skills in Java and other languages (beyond R and Python which we use most frequently); skills with standard reporting tools such as QlikView/Tableau/etc.

Personal Attributes

  • Smart - intellectual dexterity
  • High integrity
  • Low ego
  • Pragmatic problem- solver - someone who looks for solutions rather than worrying about problems

We’re Seriously Playful

Officially, we’re a leading interactive entertainment company for the mobile world. Unofficially, we’re a serious business that’s not afraid to have fun. Every day at King, we mix intuition with logic, art with science and magic with mathematics to create the games the world loves to play. Together with our parent company Activision Blizzard, our mission is to bring moments of magic to everyday life. If you think this is something you can help us achieve, let’s talk.

A great saga needs all sorts of heroes

Making games is fun. Especially when you do it with people who share the same idea of what makes a good workplace, great. We design games for everyone, no matter where they are or who they are, and we employ all sorts of people from all kinds of backgrounds to bring them to life. Truth is, we simply can’t expect diversity in our players and originality in our games without first nurturing it in our people. A great saga needs all sorts of heroes. And that’s it.

Apply now!

Want to join our Kingdom? You’ll find all you need to apply, plus more information on our culture, values and benefits, including relocation packages at jobs.king.com. All applications should be made in English.