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Video Game Development, Entertainment, Software

Senior External Development Manager

San Mateo, CAOnsiteFull TimeManager / HeadPosted 11 days agoVisa sponsorship available

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Required skills

  • external development
  • vendor management
  • RFP
  • SOW
  • budget ownership
  • forecasting
  • production planning
  • quality oversight
  • process design
  • Jira

Nice to have

  • Perforce
  • game engine integration
  • franchise management
  • publisher-side production
  • cross-studio coordination
  • Eastern Europe

Role summary

We are seeking a Senior External Development Manager to lead our external development strategy and operations for AAA video game projects. This role involves setting the strategy in partnership with leadership, designing and implementing pipelines, workflows, and operational policies, and managing vendor relationships from sourcing and negotiation to contract lifecycle and quality oversight. You will also manage the external development budget, forecast spending, and ensure alignment between internal and external production schedules. The position requires a blend of strategic thinking and hands-on execution, with a focus on building and growing the external development function. Experience with Jira, ShotGrid, and strong spreadsheet skills are essential.

WE ARE GAME MAKERS

Who We Are:

We are a diverse team of developers driven by a passion for our art, united by our core values and inspired by a culture of inclusivity to build amazing games that thrill players everywhere. We pursue growth and innovation in an environment of safety and trust. Our culture is built on the belief that the more varied voices in our collective will strengthen our team and our games. We are looking for our next teammate who will raise our bar and make us better.

What We Need:

We are seeking a senior external development leader to own how 31st Union works with external partners: what we send out, who we send it to, how it comes back, and how good it is when it does. You will set our external development strategy in partnership with the Head of Operations and studio leadership, and then build the thing you designed, including the pipelines, trackers, briefs, review loops, and onboarding paths that our partnerships actually run on.

This role combines strategy ownership with hands-on production ownership. You are the person in the room when we decide what is viable to outsource on our AAA project. You are also the person who writes the tracker, fixes the brief template, and chases the access ticket. You will partner closely with Production to work out how we resource and schedule external work, and with Art Direction and our discipline leads to make sure the feedback reaching a vendor's team is specific, consistent, and actionable. This is a first-in-seat role. There is no external development team to inherit, and building one as our slate grows is part of the job.

What You'll Do:

  • External Development Strategy: Partner with Head of Operations and studio leadership to set and evolve our external development strategy: which disciplines are viable to send out, which partnership model fits each (asset vendor, embedded team, full co-development), and what we deliberately keep in house. Draft the internal-versus-external business cases behind those calls rather than presenting them as instinct.
  • Pipeline & Workflow Ownership: Design, implement, and maintain the tools, systems, workflows, and operational policies that external development runs on in partnership with our domain leaders, including brief and outsourcing pack templates, asset trackers, review protocols, acceptance criteria, onboarding documentation, and the reporting standards behind all of it.
  • Partner Sourcing & Commercial Management: Lead the RFP process, vendor outreach, portfolio and evaluation, as well as partner selection. Negotiate scope, capacity, cost, and delivery expectations against project goals and budget. Own the lifecycle of each partnership in collaboration with internal stakeholders: contracts and amendments with Legal and Procurement, invoices, renewals and expirations, offboarding, and onboarding, including driving IT and information security escalations to resolution so partners are productive quickly and safely.
  • Budget & Forecasting: Manage the studio's external development budget and forecast process in partnership with the Operations team. Model cost against capacity, identify where spend is buying us the most, review deliverables against contractual criteria before milestone payments release, and bring cost-efficiency options to leadership before you are asked for them.
  • Production Partnership: Work with Production and discipline leads to determine how we actually produce external development: where the capacity gaps are, how external work is sequenced against internal milestones, and how workload is balanced across our internal teams and our external partners. Make sure external schedules and internal plans are aligned.
  • Creative Partnership & Quality Oversight: Partner with Art Direction, craft owners, and discipline leads to define creative briefs, style guides, benchmark assets, and quality bars before production starts. Build and run the review cadence that gets vendor work in front of the right internal eyes on time, and make sure what goes back out is actionable direction. Protect our Art Directors' review time by establishing a technical and visual pre-screen process, and keep the loop tight enough that a partner's team improves over the course of an engagement.
  • Delivery Oversight, Risk & Reporting: Build and manage vendor production schedules, monitor milestone health across the full slate of partnerships, and proactively mitigate risk from schedule, budget, or scope drift, bringing problems forward early with options attached rather than warnings. Own our external development database and reporting standards, and report vendor KPIs, capacity, spend, and delivery trends to studio leadership and publisher stakeholders in terms they can act on.
  • Building The Function & The Bench: Grow external development from a function of one into a team as our slate requires it, including headcount recommendations, structure, and career pathing. Mentor and calibrate the team members managing our external engagements across our disciplines, whether or not they report to you.

    • Who You Are:

  • A Strategist Who Still Builds: You can hold a multi-year view of our partner portfolio and open a spreadsheet the same afternoon. You are not looking for a role where the work arrives pre-scoped, and you are not looking for one where you only build other people's plans. You want both, and you know the difference between the two modes.
  • An Operator With Commercial Teeth: You have run RFPs, negotiated SOWs and rates, and owned a budget rather than reported on one. You are comfortable saying no to a partner, and comfortable explaining to a lead why the cheaper bid is the more expensive decision.
  • Grounded In The Craft: You may not be an artist, but you can tell the difference between a vendor skill gap, a brief gap, and a process gap, and you know which one you are looking at before you write the feedback. You understand what a style guide and a benchmark asset are for, and why a technical constraint agreed in week one saves a month in week twelve.
  • A Collaborator, A Diplomat, And A Developer Of People: You are the bridge between internal leads who want it perfect, production who wants it on the date, and a partner team eleven time zones away who wants a clear answer. You convey complex creative feedback clearly and diplomatically, often to non-native English speakers, and you manage communication windows rather than complaining about them. You articulate not just the "what" but the "why," to your own team and to our partners, and you treat a vendor as capability to be grown rather than capacity to be bought.
  • Comfortable In The "Gray" Areas: You are joining a function that does not fully exist yet. You are comfortable shaping new processes and adjusting them as the department evolves, and you would rather establish the standard than wait for one.
  • Tooling: Strong working knowledge of Jira and ShotGrid/Flow, and enough spreadsheet and data fluency to build the reporting yourself. Familiarity with Perforce or equivalent source control, and with how assets get integrated into a live engine build.
  • Level of Experience: 6 to 8+ years of external development or production experience in the video game industry, with a track record of running external development across multiple projects or a full franchise and real budget ownership.

    • Bonus Points:

  • Experience standing up an external development or outsourcing function from scratch.
  • Experience with global partners across multiple time zones and cultures, including studios in Eastern Europe, South America, or Asia.
  • Familiarity with publisher-side production and cross-studio coordination.
  • Hands-on background in one of the disciplines we outsource, whether art, animation, audio, engineering, or QA.

    • The pay range for this position in California at the start of employment is expected to be between $127,500 and $188,700 per Year. However, base pay offered is based on market location, and may vary further depending on individualized factors for job candidates, such as job-related knowledge, skills, experience, and other objective business considerations. Subject to those same considerations, the total compensation package for employees in regular roles may also include other elements, including a bonus and/or equity awards, in addition to a full range of medical, financial, and/or other benefits, provided that temporary or intern roles will not be eligible for many of these payments or benefits. Details of participation in compensation and benefit plans (if applicable) will be provided if an employee receives an offer of employment. If hired, employee will be in an ~at-will position~ and the company reserves the right to modify base salary (as well as any other discretionary payment or compensation or benefit program) at any time, including for reasons related to individual performance, company or individual department/team performance, and market factors.

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