Community Lead

CRITICAL REFLEX is looking for a Community Lead to establish Community as a distinct function alongside Social Media.

This is a senior, hands-on leadership role responsible for defining the team’s remit, operating model, standards and priorities, and delivering results alongside the people you lead.

You’ll inherit a Discord of around 200,000 members, Steam communities across our portfolio, game-specific spaces, volunteer moderator relationships and three Community Managers, with the freedom to reshape the team and its systems around what the function genuinely needs.

Your mission is to turn this existing footprint into a coherent, sustainable ecosystem without sanding off its personality, something players actively choose to join, return to and identify with.

What you’ll do

• Define the purpose, remit and operating model of Community at CRITICAL REFLEX.

• Build community strategy for the function, including priorities, ownership, measures of success and the level of support different games should throughout their life cycle.

• Decide how the central CR community connects to individual game fandoms

• Lead and develop the Community team, set a clear quality bar, improve workload ownership and build rhythms that make the team stronger.

• Work closely with Marketing, Social Media, Production, developers and leadership to turn player activity into useful insight.

• Support community programming, launches, playtests, player conversations, events, activations, moderation, and other day-to-day community initiatives.

• Improve moderation standards, escalation routes, safety processes and decision-making responsibilities, so the team can respond quickly and clearly when attention spikes or something weird starts chewing through the walls.

• Make decisions within your remit, not only produce recommendations. Where decisions exceed your authority, you will present clear options, risks and a recommended course of action to department leadership.

• Represent CR, including AMAs, livestreams, interviews, videos and conference appearances. It is entirely optional, and while it will be actively supported for a Lead who enjoys it, it will not influence consideration of otherwise equally qualified candidates.

What you need to bring

• Experience owning the strategy, growth, operations, health, safety, and outcomes of a gaming community of at least 70,000 members. 

• Experience directly managing and developing a professional team, including setting expectations, delegating ownership, giving difficult feedback, addressing underperformance, recognising different forms of talent and creating individual development paths. 

• Experience building, rebuilding, or significantly evolving a  professionalised Community function or operating model. This included defining its remit, ownership boundaries, team responsibilities, planning rhythm, service levels, stakeholder interfaces, governance and measures of success.

• Experience prioritising community investment across multiple products, communities or audiences with competing needs and different lifecycle stages.

• Experience influencing independently operated development teams and creating standards, playbooks and support models they will actually adopt, while respecting their ownership, creative identity and relationship with players.

• Ability to confidently make decisions within your area of responsibility and presenting clear recommendations, options, and risks when broader alignment is required. 

• Experience leading responses to significant community, moderation, safety, reputational or launch-related incidents, including coordinating internal stakeholders and making time-sensitive decisions.

• Ability to combine quantitative and qualitative evidence, define meaningful community-health measures and distinguish actionable patterns from vanity metrics or vocal minorities.

• Excellent written and spoken English

The person we’re looking for:

• Cares deeply about building communities people actually care about.

• Has strong taste, high standards and a clear sense of what makes a community healthy, distinctive and worth returning to.

• Understands the difference between a busy audience and a genuine community.

• Brings original thinking to community strategy, team design and operating structure rather than defaulting to the standard publisher playbook.

• Thinks beyond message volume, member counts and short-term engagement.

• Can turn broad ambition into clear priorities, experiments, operating models and measurable outcomes.

• Knows how to prioritise ruthlessly, say no when necessary, stop work that is not creating meaningful value and challenge inherited assumptions.

• Knows how to coach different kinds of people, give autonomy without becoming vague and use authority without getting weird about it.

• Is comfortable making judgement calls before every piece of information is available.

• Either already understands the CRITICAL REFLEX catalogue and audience or is genuinely excited to learn.

• This role is best suited to someone who enjoys taking ownership, making decisions, and building new approaches rather than simply maintaining existing processes.

Nice to have:

• Working within a games publisher or multi-title portfolio.

• Operating large Discord ecosystems and Steam communities.

• Supporting playtests, launches and major community-facing moments.

• Hands-on experience with retention analysis, cohort measurement, sentiment tooling or community analytics platforms.

• Managing and developing volunteer moderator teams.

• Building creator, ambassador, advocate or high-value member programmes.

• Additional languages.

Benefits:

• Fully remote (preferably based in or near a European timezone for smoother collaboration)

• 28 paid vacation days per year plus bank holidays

• 14 days’ sick leave per year, fully paid

• EAP via Spill

• Annual performance-based bonus