Senior Art & Design Career Manager — EA SPORTS™ UFC
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Senior Art & Design Career Manager — EA SPORTS™ UFC
The EA SPORTS UFC franchise offers the electrifying spectacle and entertainment of MMA for over 20 million players across the globe. It delivers fluid and responsive mixed martial arts through inventive gameplay technology.
Located in Vancouver, British Columbia, the EA SPORTS UFC team is on a mission to become the world's greatest fighting game. If you're passionate about building immersive digital entertainment, this is the role of a lifetime.
Located in Vancouver, British Columbia, the EA SPORTS UFC team is on a mission to become the world's greatest fighting game. If you're passionate about building immersive digital entertainment, this is the role of a lifetime.
Reporting to the Senior Creative Director, the Senior Art & Design Career Manager (CM) is a high-level organizational leader responsible for the long-term career progression, discipline health, and operational structures supporting our creative staff. In this role, you will lead a department of managers, lead creatives, and individual contributors across multiple art and design disciplines.This is a pure people-leadership and organizational development role. You will focus entirely on building high-performing creative cultures, scaling career frameworks, navigating industry tool transformations, and mentoring future creative leaders, while leaving day-to-day game deliverable approvals and creative direction to the Art and Design Directors.
This team works hybrid/onsite in Vancouver, 3 days/week: Tuesday - Thursday.
Your Responsibilities
This team works hybrid/onsite in Vancouver, 3 days/week: Tuesday - Thursday.
Your Responsibilities
- Organizational Leadership & Coaching: Provide direct line management, coaching, and career development for Artists and Designers across multiple disciplines. Mentor, develop, and prepare future creative leads and art/design managers.
- Scale Career Frameworks: Define, refine, and champion clear career pathways, competency grids, and promotion criteria studio-wide, ensuring transparency and equity across all creative levels.
- Strategic Workforce Planning: Partner with executive leadership on studio-wide headcount planning, creative team structuring, succession planning, and recruiting strategies to build a world-class creative culture.
- Discipline Capability & Knowledge Sharing: Organize and lead mentorship programs, cross-project knowledge-sharing, and skill-acquisition initiatives to continuously elevate our studio’s overall creative capabilities.
- Navigate Workflow & Tool Transformations: Partner with Technical Art and Technical Design leadership to help our creative teams navigate major industry shifts—including the adoption of AI-assisted design workflows—focusing on change management, skills transition, and ethical, high-impact tool integration.
- Promote Psychological Safety & Health: Cultivate a high-trust, diverse, and inclusive studio culture. Establish proactive initiatives, processes, and metrics to monitor department morale, resolve high-level personnel conflicts, and prevent creative burnout.
Your Qualifications
- 10+ years of professional experience within game development, VFX, or creative tech industries, with a deep understanding of art/design production pipelines.
- 5+ years of direct people leadership experience, including a proven track record of managing managers, lead artists/designers, or multi-disciplinary creative organizations of 10 to 20+ creatives.
- Mastery of People Operations: Expert-level experience with career pathing, goal setting, mediation, performance evaluation systems, and executive coaching.
- Change Management Expertise: Demonstrated history of guiding creative teams through organizational shifts, tool chain transformations, and workflow evolutions (such as integrating AI-assisted tools) with empathy and clear communication.
- Talent Acquisition Strategy: Strong experience partner-hiring; you understand how to identify, recruit, and onboard senior creative talent based on long-term studio needs.
- High EQ & Strategic Communication: Exceptional interpersonal skills with a proven ability to align priorities, advocate for creative staff, and collaborate closely with HR, Recruiting, and Studio Leadership.