Lead UX Designer at Kabam in Vancouver, British Columbia, CA

At Kabam, we’re constantly raising the bar of excellence in free-to-play gaming. We hire for passion and diversity so that we can triumph in our collective skill. Our teams are made up of a fusion of personalities and interests bound together by a collaborative nature, fun-loving culture, and a drive to do what it takes to make great games. And this is where you come in…

As Lead UX Designer, you lead and mentor a team of UI, Technical UI, and UX Designers on a mature, top-grossing mobile title while staying hands-on yourself. This is a player-coach role: you set direction for the team and you do the work alongside them, owning significant design problems end to end. You craft human-centered experiences grounded in interaction and visual design principles, working inside an established product, brand, and design system rather than from a blank page. You are highly organized, self-motivated, and an excellent communicator who moves easily between high-level strategy and low-level detail. You have an inherent desire to understand players and to represent them in the game.

This role is a full-time, on-site position based 5 days a week at our Downtown Vancouver studio.

In this role, you can expect to:

• Own significant design problems directly as a hands-on contributor, setting the quality bar by example.
• Define and drive UX outcomes for live features and longer-term product bets.
• Lead and mentor a team of UI, Technical UI, and UX Designers, developing them through direct collaboration and review.
• Work within the demands of a live-service cadence, balancing new feature work against ongoing events, seasonal content, and the existing UI framework.
• Own the UI and UX process, coalescing product, game design, engineering, art, and live ops needs into actionable artifacts.
• Present and communicate design intent and outcomes to stakeholders, driving designs to completion at the highest quality.
• Collaborate with the leadership team on capacity plans, development, and the product roadmap.
• Partner with data and UXR teams to build a deep understanding of players and create meaningful experiences for them.
• Partner with the UXR team to test and validate designs.
• Review and give feedback on the team's deliverables.
• Foster an environment for knowledge sharing and learning.
• Participate in staffing, recruitment, and team resource allocation.

To be successful in this role, your background includes:

• Education in Interaction Design, HCI, Cognitive Science, Psychology, or a design-related field with Human Factors.
• An exceptional portfolio demonstrating effective solutions to human-centered design and visual design problems, ideally including live or shipped product work.
• 8+ years as a UI and/or UX Designer or Product Designer in a professional capacity, preferably within video games.
• One or more shipped titles in a Lead UX Designer role, preferably in mobile free-to-play games.
• Direct experience designing for mobile, free-to-play, live-service games, including working inside an established design system and shipping into a live product.
• Comfortable operating as a player-coach: leading a team while carrying a meaningful hands-on design load.
• Expert-level command of Figma (the team's primary tool) and the Adobe Suite, plus strong prototyping skills. Familiarity with other industry tools (Sketch, and similar) is welcome.
• Deep understanding of target players: their needs, motivations, behaviors, and constraints.
• The ability to solve complex problems in resourceful, effective ways with human-centered design in mind.
• Experience with Inclusive Design and advocacy.
• An exceptional eye for visual design.
• Ability to own multiple features in parallel.
• Exceptional oral and written communication skills.
• Self-starter with excellent prioritization skills.

Nice to Haves:

• Experience with Unity, including the UI pipeline, is a major plus.
• Ability to translate product KPIs into UX deliverables.
• Experience with data-driven (quantitative) design.
• Experience in user research.
• Experience working with licensed IP and brand guidelines.
• A passion for games and for Marvel.

Our success is due to the hard work of our people. We share our success with our people through flexible benefits and reward programs, sweet swag, snacks, and more. Here’s a look at some of the support we provide our people:

• Extended Health Coverage: effective day one, no waiting period! Our benefits cover health, dental, life, disability, and extended paramedical services such as vision care, mental health practitioners, massage, physiotherapy, acupuncture, and much more.

• DEIB Benefits: DEIB is important to us and to our people - that’s why our benefits include gender-affirming care, fertility care, and other hormonal treatments and drugs.

• Flexible Spending Accounts: our benefits are built on a flex credit model, so you’re able to choose the coverage levels that are right for you, and allocate the rest to a group RRSP/TFSA, Health Spending account, and/or Personal Spending Account.

• RRSP Matching: everyone retires eventually, and we help our people save for their futures with a contribution matching program once you reach 90 days with us.

• Commuter Benefit: we believe in the power of in-person collaboration, and want to support you in making it work for you! We provide a flexible, monthly cash allowance to help cover the costs of transit, parking, or even personal logistics like childcare and pet care.

• PTO and Parental Leave: we offer paid parental leave, flexible paid time off, paid time off for volunteering, sick leave, and holiday closures.

• Employee and Family Assistance Program: this program provides crisis management support, immediate mental health care, and generalized support for emotional, mental, and financial well-being.

• Telus Virtual Health: we provide increased access to remote healthcare providers for prescription refills or referrals from the comfort of your home.

• Learning and growth: We encourage people to grow both personally and professionally, and support this through regular lunch & learns and an education stipend.

• Pay transparency: We share with employees the pay range their role falls within and clear career maps to determine how they can grow within their role or level-up to a promotion.

• Cool spaces: Our offices are in Vancouver, Montreal, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. Whether it’s summers on the rooftop patio in Downtown Vancouver, or watching the fireworks in Montreal’s South Shore - we want our people to feel like their time spent in office is worthwhile!

• Giving back: Kabammers have a dedicated paid day off every year to volunteer to a cause close to their hearts. Some teams even band together for group volunteer days off-site!

Excited by this opportunity? Kabam is dedicated to growing our diverse and inclusive workforce, so if your past experience doesn’t perfectly match the listed requirements we encourage you to apply anyways - you could be a great fit for this or other positions.

We invite you to apply now and start the conversation with us. Together, we can create and support some of the best games ever made and entertain the world!

About Kabam

Kabam is a world leader in developing entertaining, immersive, and highly social multiplayer games, bringing high-quality graphics, next-generation technology, and revolutionary gameplay to players around the world.

Kabam’s games, Marvel Contest of Champions, Shop Titans, and more have generated hundreds of millions of downloads and have received multiple awards including Apple’s Editor’s Choice and Google Play’s Best Game of the Year.

Founded in 2006, Kabam has studios and offices in Vancouver & Montreal in Canada, and Los Angeles & San Francisco in the United States. Kabam is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Netmarble Games.

Kabam is an Equal Employment Opportunity employer committed to building a diverse and equitable workplace, and inclusive environment for all existing and potential employees. Employment decisions are based on candidate qualifications and business need, not race, color, ancestry, place of origin, age, sex (including pregnancy), gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, political belief, religion, creed, marital or family status, medical condition, genetic information, physical or mental disability, military or veteran status, prior criminal conviction or any other protected class in accordance with federal, state or provincial and local laws and ordinances. Accommodations will be provided as requested by candidates taking part in all aspects of the selection process.