R&D Group Manager

At Playstudios, we create engaging and innovative gaming experiences that captivate millions of players worldwide. Our focus is on combining creativity, technology, and data-driven insights to craft exceptional games. We are looking for a R&D Group Manager to join our POP! Slots team in Tel Aviv. This is a hands-on leadership role for an experienced developer who enjoys building scalable systems, solving complex technical challenges, and leading people with clarity, ownership, and care.
If you are passionate about clean code, strong engineering culture, high-scale products, and leading a team that moves fast while keeping a high technical bar - we would love to meet you.This is an exciting opportunity to join the company’s leading studio, with significant room for personal and professional growth.
Key Responsibilities:

Lead and mentor a group of software developers, QA engineers, Tech artists and managers, internal and third party providers, supporting their professional growth, technical decision-making, and day-to-day execution.

Take ownership of end-to-end development processes, from technical design and implementation to code reviews, delivery, monitoring, and production quality.

Design, develop, and maintain scalable, high-performance systems for a live gaming product.

Provide technical guidance and hands-on support in Java and C++, while helping the team make smart architecture and implementation decisions.

Collaborate closely with Product, Game Design, QA, DevOps, Data, and other engineering teams to deliver features that support business goals and improve the player experience.

Break down complex technical problems into clear plans, priorities, and execution steps.

Promote engineering best practices, including clean code, design patterns, testing, performance optimization, and production stability.

Identify technical risks, improve existing systems, and proactively suggest better tools, processes, and architecture where needed.

Support the team in balancing speed, quality, scalability, and long-term maintainability.

Requirements

6+ years of hands-on software development experience.

3+ years experience as a Team Lead / Tech Lead.

Experience working and managing third-party contractors.

Hands-on experience with C++.

Experience in the gaming industry, especially with live games or mobile games.

Experience designing and developing large-scale software systems.

Strong understanding of software architecture, design patterns, performance, and production-quality development.

Ability to lead technical discussions, review code, guide developers, and make thoughtful engineering decisions.

Strong communication skills, with the ability to work effectively with both technical and non-technical stakeholders.

A proactive, ownership-driven mindset with the ability to work in a fast-paced and dynamic environment.

Fluent English.

Experience with AI tools.

YOU GET BONUS POINTS FOR

Experience with Lua.

Experience with the Spring framework.

Experience with NoSQL databases, such as MongoDB, Couchbase, Hadoop, or Spark.

Experience with unit testing frameworks, such as JUnit.

This is a hybrid role based in our Tel Aviv office