Principal Data Scientist | New Games

Craft: Data, Analytics & Strategy

Job Description:

Principal Data Scientist / Senior for Candy Solitaire and New Games

We are looking for an exceptional Principal Data Scientist (or Senior Data Scientist, depending on the experience) to join our New Games Studio, partnering closely with the team behind Candy Crush Solitaire, one of our most exciting new releases and New Games.

In this role, you will be a strategic technical expert and thought partner—trusted by game leads, designers, and fellow scientists alike. You will work alongside a high-performing analytics team, using your skills to elevate product decisions, mentor peers, and enhance our tooling and methodologies.

Your role with our Kingdom:

As Principal Data Scientist (or Senior) you will:

• Act as the senior technical lead and subject-matter expert within the Data Science team for Candy Crush Solitaire and other New Games.
• Drive high-impact analysis and experimentation, with end-to-end ownership from design through communication of insights.
• Serve as a key partner to the Associate Director and other Data Scientists, helping shape the team’s strategic focus, analytics practices, and long-term planning—while maintaining an individual contributor role.
• Mentor and support other more junior data scientists, helping to raise the craft across the studio.

Specifically, you’ll:

• Take a bigger picture approach to identify potential business opportunities and scope/design approaches to capture those opportunities
• Translate business needs to technical requirements and AB-tests, working with development teams to ensure correct implementation and tracking
• Develop and evolve analytic strategies and perform analyses of complex scenarios and AB-tests, both systematically and on a one-off basis.
• Take pride in carefully checking, debugging, and problem solving 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 the team
• Champion data within the team, and share your knowledge with the wider Data Science community
• Help foster and shape an environment of collaboration with other DS, both within New Games and across King, specifically helping mentor colleagues earlier in their career progression.

Required Skills

• You must be able to leverage your deep expertise within quantitative analysis, understanding player behavior and the ability to draw business insights that add real value to King’s long term interests
• You will have demonstrated the ability to collaborate in a fast paced environment with people from diverse backgrounds. This role will involve working with teams and individuals across King - such as Game Developers, Producers and Game Artists, so excellent communication skills are essential.
• You will also need:
  • Product insight: You should have experience of combining player behaviour based on data with the ability to understand the problems in our game and business, in order to provide reliable and robust recommendations and decisions.
  • Technical skills: We make intensive usage of SQL, cloud services, and Python/R analytical stack, so strong skills in at least two of these domains is crucial. A very good grasp of applied statistics (especially to time series) is also a must combined with experience in experimental design
  • Communication: You need extensive experience in ways of communicating, visualizing and reporting your results/analysis so they are clear and unambiguous. Your insights will need to be digested by people with diverse degrees of numerical proficiency, so getting the right message across to different audiences is a key part of the job.

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 prior experience that might be helpful, but is not required, includes:

• Experience working in a live mobile game
• Cloud-based big data solutions such as BigQuery;
• Behavioral psychology/economics
• Robust understanding of more advanced statistical techniques suitable for analysis of highly skewed populations
• Experience in predictive analytics, segmentation, and related areas
• Standard reporting tools such as Looker/Tableau/etc.

About King

With a mission of Making the World Playful, King is a leading interactive entertainment company with more than 20 years of history of delivering some of the world’s most iconic games in the mobile gaming industry, including the world-famous Candy Crush franchise, as well as other mobile game hits such as Farm Heroes Saga. King games are played by more than 200 million monthly active users. King, part of Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT), has Kingsters in Stockholm, Malmö, London, Barcelona, Berlin, Dublin, San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles and Malta. More information can be found at King.com or by following us on LinkedIn, @lifeatking on Instagram, or @king_games on X.