Senior LiveOps Game Designer

📍 Location: Prioritising Hybrid (Guildford / Greater London) but will also evaluate Remote applicants (UK / EU preferred)

🧠 Experience: 5+ years in live service game design

🚀 Focus: LiveOps, economies, retention, social systems

About the Role

We’re looking for a Senior / Lead LiveOps Game Designer to own the long term health and performance of HELIX Life, our flagship large scale social life simulation game built on the HELIX UGC platform.

This role sits at the intersection of game design, LiveOps strategy, and data-driven decision-making. You’ll be responsible for designing and operating progression systems, live events, economies, and social loops — and continuously iterating on them based on real player behaviour. Post initial definition of features, this role requires continuous optimisation role, focused on retention, engagement, social growth, and revenue across the full player lifecycle.

Key Responsibilities

• Own and improve core LiveOps KPIs, including D1 / D7 / D30 retention and beyond, session frequency, session length, ARPU / ARPDAU, conversion funnels, churn drivers, and K-factor — with strong attention to long-tenured and high value players.
• Design hypotheses, run experiments, analyse cohorts, and translate insights into concrete design changes.
• Continuously improve FTUE, onboarding flows, and early game clarity.
• Identify friction points across the entire player lifecycle and systematically remove them.
• Design and maintain a large-scale live economy (soft currency, premium currency, sinks, sources, inflation control).
• Balance progression pacing for different player archetypes (casual, social, grinders, high value players).
• Design monetisation systems that are sustainable, ethical, and retention-positive.
• Own the live content and LiveOps calendar, including events, promotions, seasonal beats, and limited-time systems.
• Design events that drive re-engagement, social play, and organic growth.
• Define daily, weekly, and monthly gameplay rhythms that give players clear reasons to return.
• Run post mortems on live events and rapidly iterate based on results.
• Design systems that encourage inviting friends, forming groups, and social dependency.
• Improve organic growth through gameplay driven social and viral mechanics.
• Work closely with engineers, artists, designers, and product leadership to ship features end-to-end.
• Translate high level goals into clear, implementable design specifications.
• Review implementations to ensure design intent survives production constraints.
• Mentor and guide other designers as the team grows.

Required Skills & Experience

• 5+ years designing and operating live service games.
• Proven track record of measurably improving retention, engagement, and revenue on shipped titles.
• Strong experience with live economies, monetisation, and progression systems.
• Hands on ownership of LiveOps strategy (not just feature contribution).
• Strong analytical skills and comfort working directly with dashboards, data tools, and spreadsheets.
• Experience collaborating with cross-functional teams in a production environment.

Desirable Skills

• Experience with large scale social, sandbox, or online multiplayer games.
• Experience with UGC platforms or creator driven economies.
• Experience operating live games with large, long tenured player bases.
• Familiarity with experimentation frameworks (A/B testing, cohort analysis).
• Comfort working in fast-moving, founder-led teams with high ownership and autonomy.

Why Join Us

• You’ll shape the flagship world of a new UGC platform, not just ship isolated features.
• High ownership, high impact, low bureaucracy.
• Design decisions ship quickly and are evaluated honestly through data.
• You’ll influence not just a game, but the foundation of a broader ecosystem.

If you’re the kind of designer who gets excited watching a retention curve bend upward because of something you shipped, HELIX Life will feel like home.