Game Studio Jobs in Madison, WI (NOW HIRING)

Filament Games seeks a talented and self-driven Production Manager to join our team in creating next generation learning games and technology solutions. The Production Manager owns the health of our production organization - the people, the process, and the reporting that keep 40+ developers shipping great educational games on time and on budget. This role reports directly to Filament's CEO and leads our production team, including producers, QA, and A/V.

The Production Manager is responsible for:

• Production Team Leadership: Supporting a stable of effective producers, running the weekly production cadence, and serving as the studio's primary escalation point for production questions.
• Resource Allocation and Planning: Owning studio-wide allocation across all active projects in partnership with functional managers, advising on appropriate studio headcount based on deal flow.
• Reporting and Studio Visibility: Delivering the monthly Project Health Report, disseminating client feedback, and overseeing biweekly sprint reports.
• Process Ownership: Maintaining and iterating on our development processes, division of labor, and documentation.
• Operations Support: Overseeing A/V production, playtesting, QA coordination, and project accounting support in collaboration with the relevant departments.
• Automation and AI Leverage: Continuously streamlining and improving studio operations work using AI tooling - turning recurring tasks, reports, documents, and estimates into automated or AI-assisted workflows. Filament's leadership team has transformed the way it works with AI tools, and continues to evolve our process daily. This role is expected to be a driver of that work, not a passenger.

This opening is classified as a regular, full-time position.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead the production team day to day: serve as the main contact for general production questions, run the weekly production call, and work with Account Managers and functional managers to triage project issues.
• Project and/or Account manage projects: fulfill the role of Project Manager and, in some cases, Account Manager on individual projects (direct allocation will vary but expect ~50% FTE allocation to individual projects on average).
• Maintain and grow (as needed) a stable of effective game producers, including hiring, coaching, career development, and performance conversations.
• Own the studio allocation plan: maintain the allocation model, meet regularly with functional managers, lead the biweekly allocation meeting, and flag staffing risks early.
• Produce and post the monthly Project Health Report and own the client temperature check process in partnership with Account Managers.
  
• Oversee the smooth operation of the QA and A/V departments, including A/V scheduling, voice talent casting and delivery, SFX sourcing, contractor relationships, and drafting A/V contracts for account manager review. (The QA team manager reports to this role.)
• Track and coordinate playtesting across active projects.
• Support the accounting department by maintaining project schedule earn reports and keeping project billing accurate.
• Support the sales team with production input on estimates, budgets, and proposed teams.
• Ensure that project teams deliver all necessary materials and support to the marketing team.
• Provide first-line HR support to the production team and QA manager.
• Identify recurring operational work and replace it with AI-assisted or automated workflows, partnering with our engineering leadership on internal tooling.
  

Measures of Success

• Projects land on schedule and on budget, and variances are visible to leadership well before they become problems.
• Producers report feeling supported, developed, and clear on expectations; producer retention is strong.
• Allocation is accurate and forward-looking enough that staffing decisions are made early rather than reactively.
• Leadership receives project health, client sentiment, and earn reporting on a reliable cadence without chasing it.
• Development process documentation is current, used, and improving.
• A/V, QA, and playtesting needs are met without becoming a bottleneck for project teams.
• Recurring operational tasks measurably shrink over time as automation and AI-assisted workflows take them over.

Required Experience

• 10+ years of experience in games, ed tech, or comparable software product development.
• 5+ years managing people directly, including managing other producers or project leads.
• Demonstrated experience building project budgets, allocating resources across multiple concurrent projects, and reporting out project health to executives.
• A history of diverse roles over the course of your career - for example, QA manager and account executive, or software engineer and producer.
• Experience running agile/scrum development teams in a digital task tracker such as Jira.
• Experience utilizing AI tools (Claude, Cursor, ChatGPT, Copilot, or similar) in a professional setting, including building something reusable with them.

Required Skills

• Excellent written and verbal English, and polished presentation skills.
• Polished employee relations skills and working knowledge of common HR dos and don'ts.
• Spreadsheet badassery - proficiency with building models, not just filling in cells.
• Strong command of scheduling and allocation tooling (Google Sheets, Smartsheet, Microsoft Project, or similar).
• Hands-on expertise with Jira or an equivalent scrum task tracker, and with a documentation wiki such as Confluence.
• Ability to interpret a profit and loss statement for a project or line of business.
• Comfort building or specifying lightweight automations - AI agents, skills, scripts, or integrations - and partnering with engineers to take them further. You use AI tools as a default part of your workflow, can write effective prompts and reusable instructions, know where AI belongs and where it doesn't, and can spot a manual process that should be an automated one.
• Sound judgment on data privacy and appropriate tool use, especially given our work with children's educational products (COPPA/FERPA-adjacent contexts).

Personal Characteristics

• Genuinely enjoys developing other people and gets satisfaction from their professional wins and growth.
• Calm and clear under pressure; treats surprises as problems to solve rather than reasons to panic.
• Comfortable taking calculated risks and running experiments in an environment with high psychological safety.
• Curious and self-teaching, especially about new tools and better ways to work.
• Direct and kind - will tell you the hard thing, and will do it well.
• Bias toward action and making the studio a little better every week.
• Cares about educational impact, not just shipping.

Extra Credit

• Previous employment in the educational game industry.
• Previous teaching experience.
• QA or A/V production experience.
• Executive production, sales, or account management experience.
• Experience collaborating with web development or devops teams.
• Active participant in one or more relevant industry groups.

Note: Thanks to technology, a cover letter is not expected. Fully answering the application questions acts as your cover letter.

About Filament Games

Watch our Who We Are video.

Our team is a creative, interdisciplinary group of people who are making a difference. Through innovative educational games we're working to modernize education and revolutionize learning!

We believe that the best work - and the best life - comes from a healthy balance between work and play, discipline, and fun. Our office culture reflects this.

Filament offers a competitive benefits package, including health/dental/vision care, a Flexible Spending Account, 401k retirement plan, profit sharing, and unlimited paid time off.

Guard against scams: During the selection process, applicants will only receive official notices via email from a sender from the @filamentgames.com or @app.bamboohr.com domains. This includes scheduling interviews and coordinating reference checks, assessments, and job offers. If the person who is contacting you is not listedon the staff page on our websiteplease do not correspond with them. Unfortunately Filament will not be able to assist you if you fall victim to a job offer scam. Please report any losses to law enforcement.

We are an Equal Opportunity Employer. Applicants will be considered for positions on the basis of qualifications and ability to perform the job for which they are applying without regard to race, religion, creed, sex, age, residency, national origin, disability, sexual orientation, marital status, or physical appearance. Minorities are encouraged to apply.