Senior External Development Manager (Video Games)

Location: San Mateo, California, United States

Salary: $103,700–$153,500 per year, plus potential bonus, equity awards, and benefits.

Company

hirify.global develops and publishes video games, with this role supporting 31st Union’s AAA game development organization.

What you will do

• Set and evolve the external development strategy with the Head of Operations and studio leadership, including outsourcing models, internal-versus-external business cases, and retained in-house capabilities.
• Build and maintain external development tools, workflows, outsourcing packs, briefs, trackers, review protocols, acceptance criteria, onboarding documentation, and reporting standards.
• Lead RFPs, vendor sourcing, portfolio evaluation, partner selection, commercial negotiations, contracts, amendments, invoices, renewals, offboarding, and onboarding.
• Manage external development budgets and forecasts, evaluate cost against capacity, review milestone deliverables, and identify cost-efficiency opportunities.
• Align external schedules, capacity, workload, and milestones with Production, Art Direction, craft owners, and discipline leads while managing vendor quality and feedback loops.
• Monitor partnership risks, milestone health, KPIs, capacity, spend, and delivery trends; report actionable insights to studio leadership and publisher stakeholders, and grow the function into a team.

Requirements

• 6 to 8+ years of external development or production experience in the video game industry.
• Track record of running external development across multiple projects or a full franchise, with real budget ownership.
• Experience running RFPs, negotiating SOWs and rates, managing partner scope, capacity, cost, and delivery expectations.
• Ability to create and operate external development strategies, workflows, reporting systems, briefs, review loops, and quality criteria.
• Strong understanding of game production, creative feedback, style guides, benchmark assets, technical constraints, and vendor capability gaps.
• Ability to collaborate diplomatically with internal leads, Production, Art Direction, discipline leads, and international partner teams, including non-native English speakers.
• Strong working knowledge of Jira and ShotGrid/Flow, plus spreadsheet and data fluency sufficient to build reporting independently.
• Familiarity with Perforce or equivalent source control and with integrating assets into a live engine build.

Nice to have

• Experience building an external development or outsourcing function from scratch.
• Experience with global partners across multiple time zones and cultures, including studios in Eastern Europe, South America, or Asia.
• Familiarity with publisher-side production and cross-studio coordination.
• Hands-on experience in art, animation, audio, engineering, or QA.

Culture & Benefits

• Inclusive, diverse, and collaborative game development environment focused on safety, trust, growth, and innovation.
• Regular employee roles may include bonus and/or equity awards.
• Benefits may include medical, financial, and other benefit programs.
• Compensation varies based on market location and job-related knowledge, skills, experience, and other objective business considerations.
• The position is at-will employment.