Technical Director

Sago Mini is an award-winning company devoted to play. With three subscription services and over 10 million monthly active users, Sago Mini creates apps that seed imagination, grow wonder, and bring thoughtful design to life for preschoolers and parents worldwide. Proudly Canadian, Sago Mini is a subsidiary of Spin Master, a leading global children’s entertainment company. Along with sister studios Toca Boca and Originator, Sago Mini is part of the Piknik bundle – a collection of the world’s best apps for kids in one subscription. 

About the Role

As the Technical Director for Piknik, our subscription bundle that gives customers access to award-winning apps from Sago Mini, Toca Boca, and more, you will chart the technical future of a platform connecting 8+ apps and growing. Working alongside the Piknik team's four specialized squads (Conversion, Retention, Integration, and Tools & Scalability), you will help evolve the Piknik SDK from a shared library into a robust Platform-as-a-Product. This is a high-impact, technical, strategy-focused role where you’ll ensure our foundation is stable and ready to support our next stage of growth.

It’s important to note that this role is hybrid, requiring you to work from our downtown Toronto studio three days a week.

The anticipated salary range for this role is $135,000 to $185,000 per annum. The salary offered to a successful candidate will be dependent on several factors that may include but are not limited to years of experience within the job, years of experience within the required industry, education, etc.

This job posting is tied to an open vacancy.

You’ll thrive in this role if you…

• Treat app teams as your customers. Obsessing over the integration experience (API design, docs, etc) and removing friction, and creating shared SDKs that teams use because they want to, not because they have to.
• Are at a stage in your career where you get more enjoyment out of strategy, architecture, and enabling others instead doing hands-on implementation work yourself.
• Know how to navigate large existing codebases. You understand that in a shared ecosystem, every change has a downstream ripple effect, and you know how to strengthen the foundation without slowing down teams.
• Can weigh the purity of an architectural decision against the reality of a product deadline, finding the sweet spot between perfection and progress.

What You’ll Be Doing

• Technical Architecture & Roadmap: Define the long-term technical roadmap for the Piknik platform and SDK. You will drive consensus on architecture and take accountability for the critical 'one-way door' technology decisions.
• Strategic Alignment: Collaborate with Piknik leadership and the squads to align engineering goals with platform strategy.
• Empower App Teams: Act as the technical bridge to our app teams, ensuring the Piknik platform actively evolves to support their roadmaps and solve their pain points.
• Engineering Excellence: Champion a culture of technical rigor, mentoring developers, and acting as the guardian of quality.
• Modernization & Technical Debt: Transform our long-term technical strategy into a concrete plan that both pays down debt and clears the path for sustainable growth.
• Team Design & Scaling: Act as an "organizational engineer," designing and refining team structure to improve communication, ownership and efficient processes as we grow.

Qualifications and Skills

• 10+ years of software development experience, with at least 5+ years in a senior technical leadership role (eg: TD or Principal / Staff Engineer).
• Expertise in architecting shared libraries and mobile SDKs, coupled with an obsession for clear API design and backward compatibility.
• The Piknik SDK is currently 100% Unity, so deep Unity / C# expertise is essential. As we expand, we need a TD with native mobile experience (iOS/Swift and Android/Kotlin) to help us architect a hybrid strategy that can support Unity and native mobile.
• Familiarity with mobile ecosystems (Apple App Store, Google Play, Amazon, etc), specifically around In-App Purchases (IAP) and subscriptions.
• A history of elevating technical quality by mentoring engineers to become better decision-makers, leading effective design and code reviews, and creating clear architectural standards.
• Directly drove the architecture and execution of multiple large-scale technical initiatives, taking hands-on ownership from idea to launch.
• You speak both ‘tech’ and 'business’, easily translating complex technical topics into something non-tech stakeholders can understand. You can just as easily switch directions, turning business needs into technical goals your team can rally behind.

About the Process

• You’ll get an email response confirming we’ve received your application, and we’ll let you know within a few weeks if we’d like to schedule a follow-up.
• If you are moving ahead, your first interview will be a 30-minute chat where we'll learn more about you and answer any questions you have about the role.
• Next, join a cross-functional panel for 90 minutes to explore your career journey and tackle a collaborative case study on a real-world Piknik challenge.
• After that, we will ask you to complete a short take-home assignment.
• Your next interview will be a 90-minute technical session. We will explore your technical expertise through architectural discussions and system design exercises.
• You’ll meet with a few members of our team for a brief chat prior to a decision being made. 

We welcome and encourage applications from people with disabilities. Accommodations are available upon request for candidates taking part in all aspects of the selection process.  

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Based in Toronto, Sago Sago Toys is a subsidiary of Spin Master Limited a leading global children’s entertainment company that creates, designs and manufactures a diversified portfolio of innovative toys, games, products and entertainment properties. We hire humble and collaborative people who care about doing great work. Sago Mini is an equal opportunity employer. We value diversity at our company.