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Salary: CAD 109,000 - 124,500 / annual
A Thinking Ape is a remote mobile game studio focused on building social games with long-term player engagement. The Game Design team sits within a world-class Live Ops organization that leads the industry in supporting and growing long-running live games.
You will tackle complex design problems in mature live games, including Party in my Dorm (a free-to-play game with 100,000+ players featuring a player-driven trade economy, deep progression, and competitive PVP) and Kingdoms at War (a classic free-to-play war game with years of layered progression, currencies, and player-driven systems).
As a Systems & Economy Designer, you'll work with evolved systems and economies, identifying what isn't working, understanding root causes, and designing solutions for long-term game health. This is iterative work: you'll establish hypotheses, build models, design solutions, launch carefully, measure impact, and continue iterating based on learnings. You'll balance quantitative analysis with qualitative understanding of player behavior and community reception.
Key responsibilities include:
- Design, balance, maintain, and iterate on progression systems, currencies, reward structures, monetization systems, and core game systems
- Investigate complex system and economy problems to uncover root causes
- Build spreadsheet models to simulate progression, balance economies, and forecast outcomes
- Lead design initiatives from problem definition through implementation, launch, and analysis, collaborating with Product, Engineering, Creative, Community, and other designers
- Use data, player behavior, and community feedback to guide decisions and evaluate outcomes
- Improve tools, frameworks, documentation, and processes (including scripting, AI, and automation)
- Participate in live-ops on-call rotation for several days per month
- Stay connected to player sentiment, community discussions, and free-to-play mobile market trends
- Mentor and support other designers through collaboration and feedback
The company values curiosity, metrics-driven decisions balanced with deep community insight, and a culture of thinking, acting, measuring, and repeating. Designers are expected to take ownership of solutions through launch and beyond, dig into problems, and learn quickly.
REQUIREMENTS:
- 3–5 years of experience in game design, with focus on systems or economy design
- Experience working on free-to-play games, preferably live service mobile games
- Strong understanding of F2P economies, progression, monetization, and retention mechanics
- Strong familiarity with the free-to-play mobile market and genuine interest in understanding games, systems, and player behaviors
- Strong spreadsheet skills and experience building models to simulate balance, progression, or economic outcomes
- Strong data literacy, including familiarity with F2P KPIs and using data to investigate problems and evaluate design changes
- Experience owning design projects through implementation, launch, analysis, and iteration
- Strong written and verbal communication skills, including ability to explain complex systems and design rationale across disciplines
Nice to have:
- Experience with strategy, farming, puzzle adventure/exploration, or match-3 games
- SQL query and/or Looker experience
