Principal Product Designer, Games Discovery

About this role

Yahoo serves as a trusted guide for hundreds of millions of people globally, helping them achieve their goals online through our portfolio of iconic products. For advertisers, Yahoo Advertising offers omnichannel solutions and powerful data to engage with our brands and deliver results.

A Little About Us

Yahoo is a global media and tech company that connects people to their interests. We reach nearly 900 million people around the world, bringing them closer to what they love—from finance and sports, to shopping, gaming, and news—through trusted products, content, and technology that fuel their day. For partners, we provide a full-stack platform that helps businesses amplify growth and build meaningful connections across advertising, search, and media.

Within Yahoo Games, our mission is to make games a natural extension of the daily Yahoo experience—easy to discover, fun to play, and rewarding to return to. We are building a modern casual games platform that combines high-quality content with strong platform features across desktop and mobile web.

A Lot About You

We are seeking a thoughtful and experienced Principal Product Designer (Games) to lead discovery and acquisition experiences across the Yahoo Games ecosystem.

This is a top-of-funnel role: your primary canvas is the moments before someone plays — the entry points, browse surfaces, and cross-property touchpoints across Yahoo News, Mail, Finance, and Sports that turn casual visitors into engaged players. You'll define how people find, choose, and return to games across the Yahoo platform.

You understand how games are marketed and why people adopt them. You think in acquisition and engagement funnels, and you know how to design surfaces that move people through them — from first impression to habit.

Critically, you have a sharp instinct for fun. You inject moments of delight, personality, and play into discovery experiences — making the path to a game feel as rewarding as the game itself. Your work doesn't just convert; it earns attention. Familiarity with game engagement systems — progression, identity, community, retention — informs your thinking, but your expertise lives upstream: in the surfaces that bring people to the game in the first place. You thrive in an AI-augmented environment, actively using modern AI tools to accelerate design exploration and streamline cross-functional delivery.

Your Day at Yahoo • Own the discovery experience for Yahoo Games — designing the surfaces, entry points, and moments that move people from curious to playing.

• Make discovery feel worth discovering. Bring a sense of fun, personality, and delight to every surface — from a first impression on Yahoo News to a returning player's daily entry point. The path to a game should feel like part of the game.

• Design and optimize acquisition entry points across the Yahoo ecosystem that introduce the right game to the right person at the right moment.

• Partner with Marketing, Creative, and other Yahoo surface owners to shape promotional surfaces that convert without feeling like ads.

• Work closely with Product, Engineering, and Analytics to define and prioritize discovery opportunities, moving from strategy to shipped experiences.

• Use research, data, and experimentation to understand what earns attention and what loses it — then iterate.

• Build prototypes and high-fidelity designs in Figma and Claude Code, integrating AI tooling throughout the process to accelerate ideation, automate redundant tasks, and refine user flows from concept to execution.

• Use data, user research, and experimentation to iterate and improve designs.

• Lead and contribute to design systems and scalable frameworks, leveraging AI-assisted component generation to keep the Yahoo Games experience coherent as it scales.

• Participate in playtests and product reviews to stay close to the player perspective that informs your work upstream.

• When needed, lean in to support other Yahoo Games initiatives that require Product Design support.

• Identify opportunities to integrate AI-driven workflow efficiencies into daily design practices, collaborating with team members on effective AI tool integration.

You Must Have • 10+ years of experience designing consumer-facing digital products, with a track record of shaping product strategy and shipped experiences.

• Strong portfolio demonstrating strategic and systems-level leadership across end-to-end product experiences and shipped consumer products.

• Experience designing marketing, discovery, or acquisition surfaces — with a track record of moving people from awareness to action.

• Familiarity with game mechanics, player motivations, and community dynamics — understanding why people choose certain games, what draws them in, and what keeps them coming back.

• Ability to design discovery and acquisition experiences that connect with those instincts.

• Strong UX fundamentals, including visual design, interaction design, information architecture, and usability.

• Experience designing for desktop and mobile web platforms.

• Experience designing discovery or growth surfaces (e.g., feeds, entry points, recommendation modules) that move users from awareness to engagement.

• Strong product and analytical mindset, with hands-on experience using A/B testing, experimentation frameworks, analytics, and user insights to shape strategy and inform product direction.

• Proven ability to lead cross-functional collaboration with product managers, engineers, and leadership stakeholders to drive product direction and business outcomes.

• Exceptional communication and storytelling skills, with the ability to influence product strategy, align cross-functional stakeholders, and advocate for user-centered decisions at multiple levels of the organization.

• A strong sense of craft, with the ability to infuse personality, delight, and fun into discovery experiences — making the path to a game feel as rewarding as the game itself.

•

Similar jobs

• Senior Product Manager, Games — Ouryahoo · United States of America
• Principal Product Designer — Zocdoc · Silicon Valley, CA
• Principal Product Designer — Ethoslife · Remote
• Principal Product Designer — Rho · NYC
• Principal Product Designer — Mirelo · Hybrid
• Principal Product Designer — Clasp Group · Remote
• Principal Product Designer — Guild · San Francisco
• Principal Product Designer — Gradial · Seattle, WA