Lead Designer Systems and Economy
Mattel · El Segundo, California, United States · onsite
CREATIVITY IS OUR SUPERPOWER. It’s our heritage and it’s also our future. Because we don’t just make toys. We create innovative products and experiences that inspire fans, entertain audiences and develop children through play. Mattel is at its best when every member of our team feels respected, included, and heard—when everyone can show up as themselves and do their best work every day. We value and share an infinite range of ideas and voices that evolve and broaden our perspectives with a reach that extends into all our brands, partners, and suppliers.
The Team:
Mattel Game Studios' mission is to harness the power of Mattel's iconic brands and IP to create a wide variety of engaging digital games. Our team is guided by industry leaders with decades of experience in various facets of the gaming industry. We are seeking talented individuals to join us in our mission to create innovative and engaging digital experiences that resonate with our beloved brands. If you are passionate about gaming and eager to be part of a dynamic, forward-thinking team in family entertainment, this is the opportunity for you!
The Opportunity:
Mattel Game Studios is seeking an experienced Lead Designer, Systems and Economy to design, build, balance, and evolve the economic systems that power our free-to-play mobile games.
We operate as a publisher with external development studios. We own the revenue, and we set the economic standard those studios build to. This role is our in-house economy authority: you will drive systems and economy design at our partner studios, not hand it to them — building the models, defining the architecture, reviewing and pressure-testing studio designs, and holding their output to a standard.
You will partner closely with product management, analytics, engineering, and live operations throughout the full lifecycle of a game — from early development and economy modeling through launch, live operation, and long-term optimization — and work day-to-day with the design, engineering, and production teams at our development partners.
The ideal candidate combines strong game design instincts with quantitative rigor. You understand how progression, rewards, resources, content systems, and player behavior interact to create a healthy and engaging game economy. You will be equally comfortable designing an economy for a new title, diagnosing issues in a live game, building models and simulations, and developing tools and frameworks that can be reused and improved across multiple projects — and you have the credibility to direct design at teams you don't manage.
A key part of this role will be helping establish scalable economy design tools, methodologies, and best practices that become more sophisticated as we develop and operate additional games.
What Success Looks Like
A successful Lead Designer, Systems and Economy will help our teams create economies that are engaging for players, sustainable over the life of a game, and capable of supporting healthy long-term business performance.
Over time, you will also build a shared economy-design capability across our game portfolio — creating models, tools, processes, and institutional knowledge that allow each new project to start from a stronger foundation than the one before it.
What Your Impact Will Be:
- Own the economic architecture of our titles from early concept through launch and live operations — you are accountable for economy health across the portfolio regardless of which studio builds the game.
- Build and maintain the economic model for each title — covering every game system, resource flow, and monetization connection — and use it to pressure-test studio designs before they are built.
- Own the model and the math: currency architecture, sink/source balance, progression curves, drop rates, expected value, and price ladder design. Product Management owns the business targets, the LiveOps and offer roadmap, and the decision on when economy changes ship to live.
- Set the economy design standards our development partners build to — specifications, review gates, documentation, and acceptance criteria — and hold studio deliverables to them.
- Partner with each studio's design leads to ensure core gameplay, progression, collection, events, and metagame systems work together as a cohesive economic ecosystem — reviewing their designs, issuing specifications, and escalating when systems conflict.
- Work with Product Management and monetization partners to design economic systems that support business objectives while protecting player experience and long-term game health.
- Model the long-term economic impact of new features and content before they ship into live games, and give a clear recommendation on whether they should.
- Diagnose live economy health from game data and recommend tuning changes — partnering with Product to prioritize them and with the studio to implement them.
- Support Product and Live Operations in designing events, offers, reward structures, and content that interact correctly with the broader economy.
- Build reusable economy-design tools, models, and frameworks, and establish the standards and best practices that let every future title start from a stronger foundation.
- Serve as the subject-matter expert on free-to-play economy design across the portfolio, and contribute to broader product and greenlight strategy.
What We’re Looking For:
- 6+ years of professional game design, systems design, or economy design experience, with significant experience on free-to-play mobile games.
- Demonstrated experience designing or operating game economies on shipped titles. Ideally three or more shipped titles in an economy or systems design role, or significant economy ownership on a highly successful live game.
- Deep understanding of free-to-play mobile economies, including progression, currencies, sources and sinks, reward structures, scarcity, pricing, monetization, and long-term player engagement.
- Experience directing or influencing design at teams you don't manage — external development partners, outsourced studios, or cross-studio standards work.
- Strong quantitative and analytical skills, including the ability to translate player behavior and game systems into mathematical models.
- Experience building spreadsheets, simulations, forecasting models, or other tools used to model and balance complex game systems.
- Strong command of progression curves, probability, expected value, distributions, resource flows, and balancing techniques.
- Experience using live-game data to diagnose economy health and make design recommendations.
- Ability to think simultaneously about individual systems and the broader economic ecosystem of a game.
- Strong communication and collaboration skills, with the ability to work effectively across design, product, analytics, engineering, and leadership — internally and at partner studios.
- Comfortable being the only economy expert in the room, and being accountable when the model is wrong.
- Comfortable operating in an environment where designs evolve based on testing, player behavior, and live-game data.
Preferred Qualifications
- Bachelor's or advanced degree in Mathematics, Applied Mathematics, Statistics, Economics, or another highly quantitative field; a Mathematics degree is strongly preferred.
- Experience working on large-scale or commercially successful free-to-play mobile games.
- Experience owning an economy through both development and multiple years of live operation.
- Experience with statistical analysis, simulation, SQL, Python, or similar quantitative tools.
- Experience designing economies involving collection systems, randomized rewards, crafting, upgrading, competitive systems, events, or other complex metagame structures.
- Experience developing internal economy-design tools or frameworks used by multiple game teams.
- Understanding of experimentation and A/B testing methodology as applied to game systems and monet