Engineering Manager, Player Experience

Company: Chess.com
Employment type: FULL_TIME
Location: Remote (100% remote, work from anywhere!)

About You

First off, you're an expert at user research and you care deeply about chess and the people who play it. You know our products well, or you'll dive in hard to get there, and you can't use them without noticing the moments where a real person would get stuck, confused, or quietly give up. You'd rather watch one real player struggle through a flow than read ten dashboards about it. You believe a funnel chart tells you where players drop, but only watching a real human hit that wall tells you why, and makes you care enough to do something about it. You think from first principles, you get curious before you get to solutions, and you have a gift for getting a stranger to tell you what they're actually feeling.

This role exists to make our products serve real people, not just experiment metrics. You are the company's clearest window into the actual human experience of using Chess.com, and your job is to keep that experience honest, felt, and acted upon across the whole organization. You'll work closely with senior leadership, including the CEO and CGO, and it's on you to figure out how to reach into product, design, data, research, and community to drive change. The breadth is the point. You'll stand up and lead the user research function, managing a small, hands-on team directly and extending your reach far wider through the people you influence, not just the ones who report to you.

What you'll do

• Get inside the experience of real players. Spend real time watching actual players, and people who aren't players yet, use our products. Not the hypothetical user in a planning doc, the real person sitting there delighted or lost. You do this work yourself, and just as importantly you get other leaders and teams doing it too, because nothing replaces seeing it with your own eyes.
• Find the friction, get it to the people who own the surface, and then go back and watch real players hit the improved flow to confirm it actually got better. You're accountable for the outcome, not just the writeup. A complete loop, observe to fix to re-observe to share, becomes the template the rest of the org can copy.