• Own the people management of the engineering team through regular one-on-ones, design reviews, and feedback sessions. • Partner daily with creative leadership, production, art, and design to ensure engineering execution is aligned with milestone goals and upcoming roadmap milestones. • Own workload balancing and sustainable production practices for the engineering team. • Ensure Directors’ feedback is heard and actioned upon, and that iteration and progress trends toward established success criteria. • Represent and advocate for the engineering team in cross-disciplinary discussions, clearly communicating resource constraints, tradeoffs, and intent. • Hold the team accountable to defined standards of excellence, including problem-solving quality, velocity, and delivery against agreed timelines. • Directly manage gameplay and backend engineers, including performance management, feedback, and career development. • Partner with the Tech Director, CCO, and creative leads to support game stability and execution against the overall vision. • Establish and maintain clear team goals, execution processes, and operational best practices for engineering. • Be accountable for the delivery of engineering commitments in collaboration with production. • Support the technical pipeline by ensuring dependencies, risks, and resourcing needs are surfaced and addressed. • Participate in hiring by assessing team fit, growth needs, and onboarding readiness. • Foster a healthy, inclusive, and collaborative team culture aligned with Gardens’ values. • Lead the team through ambiguity, ensuring progress on high-impact, complex initiatives.