Studio Production Director
As Certain Affinity scales its multi-site ecosystem and expands its lead development efforts, the Studio Production Director acts as the central architect for the Production department and provides leadership oversight for Quality Assurance. Reporting directly to the company's Vice President and Executive Producer, this role is a member of the company's Senior Leadership Team (SLT) and serves as a peer to other department heads, including the Studio Art Director, Studio Design Director, and Studio Engineering Director. Working hand-in-hand with these peers and the senior executive team, the Studio Production Director drives studio-wide strategy and operational excellence. This role prioritizes:
- Operational Excellence: Designing resilient, scalable production methodologies and studio-wide resource allocation to minimize risk, stress, and friction and maximize talent impact across all projects.
- Strategic Leadership: Defining the vision for the Production and QA teams by developing leadership capability, cultivating high-performance standards, and ensuring teams have the direction, resources, and support to consistently deliver exceptional outcomes aligned with the company's values, culture, and business objectives.
- Stakeholder & Business Management: Partnering with Business Development on pitches, project staffing plans, contracts, and external vendor and partner relations. This position manages the game development related aspects of key external partnerships and oversees the production team's stakeholder engagement strategy to build deep trust and long-term resiliency.
Ultimately, the Studio Production Director ensures development operations remain agile and transparent, scaling effectively to support a diverse and growing portfolio of lead and co-development projects while promoting the values that have led to 20 years of consistent company performance and resiliency.
Core ResponsibilitiesDiscipline Leadership & The Backstop- Talent Architecture: Identifies, recruits, and integrates top-tier production talent across all studio levels, establishing a resilient succession plan for key production leadership roles.
- Quality Assurance Oversight: Provides leadership oversight of the QA discipline, managing the QA Discipline Lead to ensure that quality concerns, stability risks, bug trends, and milestone readiness are evaluated through an objective delivery and quality lens that serves as a check and balance against the development disciplines whose work is being evaluated.
- Coaching & Calibration: Institutes scalable frameworks for continuing education and high-fidelity performance feedback for the Production department, fostering a culture where objective truth is rapidly validated and separated from ego.
- Operational Backstop: Serves as the final line of defense for high-quality and timely project delivery, intervening in complex or distressed projects to provide leadership cover, untangle bottlenecks, and stabilize stakeholder relationships.
Resource Operations & Systems Engineering- Strategic Allocation: Acts as the central planner for studio-wide resource deployment. Respects the company's "team of teams" approach, dynamically load-balancing staffing and risk across projects. Aggressively guards against inefficiencies to ensure talent is leveraged where it delivers the highest impact.
- Process Architecture: Evaluates, designs, and deploys project management frameworks that minimize operational friction and eliminate waste. Ensures processes are not reliant on heroics as a production strategy, maintaining a high level of sustained output through careful planning rather than systemic burnout.
- Tooling & Infrastructure: Drives the identification and adoption of new production tools and methodologies that provide objective data and improve cross-studio alignment.
Stakeholder Management & Business Development- External Alignment: Serves as a primary game development conduit for key external partners, IP holders, sister studios, and external vendors. Actively monitors these relationships to ensure operational trust, strategic transparency, and client satisfaction.
- Pitch & Capacity Modeling: Partners directly with the Business Development team to vet new opportunities, support partner vetting and negotiations, and model the precise impact of potential contracts and contractual terms on current studio resource bandwidth and goals.
Live Service & Lead Development Evolution- Structural Pivot: Drives operational and cultural transitions required to ship Lead Development titles alongside our well-established, consistent co-development portfolio. Instills the discipline to validate early and front-load risk into pre-production, ensuring teams iterate and find the fun when team size and development costs are low.
- Change Management: Partners with other discipline directors to redesign studio workflows. Champions selective and strategic innovation, ensuring our internal infrastructure is fully equipped to support rapid iteration and the integration of new tools and technologies as appropriate.
RequirementsHard Qualifications- Experience: 12+ years of game production management experience, with 5+ years running a production team that has shipped multiple AAA console and PC titles.
- Operational Bandwidth: Exceptional capacity to manage complex, concurrent variables across multiple teams, time zones, disciplines, and sometimes even languages without missing a beat.
- Executive Partnership: A highly collaborative, low-ego team player who builds trust with the company's senior leadership team, welcomes candid and respectful debate, and works across functions to align priorities, resolve challenges, advance the broader interests of the studio, and ensure consistent high-quality project output and timeliness.
- Stakeholder Diplomacy: A proven track record of navigating high-stakes, highly sensitive conversations with internal executives, development partners, external publishers, global IP holders, sister studios, and vendors.
- Systems Thinker: A solution-oriented change agent accustomed to utilizing processes to solve complex development problems and optimize operational efficiency.
- Vigilant Guardian: A proven history of identifying critical threats to project goals early, and providing immediate, context-driven solutions without systemic escalation.
- Technical Grounding: Deep, empirical understanding of the physical realities of game development: engine constraints, build pipelines, QA integration, cross-discipline dependencies, and the ability to build bulletproof contract and milestone architecture.
Extra Credit- Previous tenure as a Studio Production Director or equivalent multi-project operational lead.
- Deep functional experience operating within the Unreal Engine (UE4/UE5) ecosystem and other proprietary game development engines.
- Direct experience fostering productive, long-term relationships with established global brands and major IP holders.
- An avid gamer across multiple platforms and genres.
Application ProtocolTo ensure mutual alignment on the high-level operational requirements of this role, Certain Affinity requires a targeted cover letter as part of the application process. This letter must concisely address the following critical areas:
- A self-assessment of the candidate's proficiency relative to the core responsibilities outlined in this job description.
- The specific professional milestones and leadership experiences most relevant to managing external stakeholders and executing a transition from co-development to Lead Development.
- Identification of primary areas of operational expertise alongside identified opportunities for continued professional growth within this executive scope.
- A candid evaluation of perceived strengths and potential blind spots regarding the requirements of the Studio Production Director position.
- The candidate's unique perspective on Certain Affinity and a justification for the alignment between the candidate's professional philosophy and the company's mission.
Salary Range: $175-$220K CAD
