Senior Product Designer - Games at Mattel in El Segundo, CA

Job description

The Opportunity:  Mattel is looking for an imaginative and highly skilled Senior Product Designer to help create the next generation of play experiences across one of the world's most iconic games portfolios. From UNO, Pictionary, Scrabble, Phase 10, Skip-Bo, Blokus, KerPlunk!, and beyond, you'll design products that bring people together through play. This is a hands-on design role for someone who understands that great games are built through strong ideas, thoughtful mechanics, rapid prototyping, meaningful playtesting, and relentless refinement. You'll transform concepts into physical products that are intuitive, engaging, and unmistakably Mattel. Working across Design, Marketing, Engineering, Consumer Insights, Packaging, Licensing, and Operations, you'll help bring new gameplay experiences from early concept through commercialization. What Your Impact Will Be:  Gameplay & Innovation Design and develop new gameplay experiences across Mattel's portfolio of family, party, strategy, and card games. Take projects from early concept exploration through prototyping, playtesting, refinement, and final product execution. Apply game design principles, player psychology, consumer insights, and a strong understanding of player behavior to create experiences that are simple to learn, rewarding to play, and built for repeat engagement. Build and test prototypes quickly, using playtesting and consumer feedback to improve mechanics, pacing, accessibility, and overall player experience. Explore opportunities to evolve established brands while contributing original ideas for entirely new ways to play. Product Design Excellence Translate gameplay into intuitive, beautifully crafted physical products, components, and interactions. Develop clear design solutions through sketching, model making, CAD, rendering, prototyping, and other appropriate visualization tools. Partner closely with Engineering and Packaging to balance creativity with manufacturing feasibility, quality, cost, and sustainability. Make thoughtful decisions around materials, component design, ergonomics, visual hierarchy, tactile interaction, and overall product experience. Review prototypes and production samples to help preserve design intent and gameplay integrity through manufacturing. Collaboration & Creative Contribution Partner effectively across Product Design, Graphic Design, Narrative Design, Marketing, Consumer Insights, Engineering, Licensing, and external development partners. Present concepts and design rationale clearly, using strong visual storytelling to build alignment and move work forward. Participate actively in design critiques, contributing constructive feedback while incorporating input from others to strengthen the work. Share knowledge, techniques, and perspective with junior designers, helping raise the quality of thinking and execution across the team. Execution & Continuous Improvement Manage multiple projects and priorities across different stages of development while maintaining a high standard of creative execution. Identify design challenges early, develop practical solutions, and make informed tradeoffs throughout development. Contribute to evolving design tools, workflows, and best practices that support faster iteration and stronger collaboration across the Games organization. What We’re Looking For:  4+ years of experience in game design, toy design, industrial design, consumer product design, or a closely related field, with demonstrated experience developing physical products. Experience designing tabletop, card, party, strategy, family, or adjacent play experiences, with a strong understanding of what creates engaging gameplay. Demonstrated experience with ideation, prototyping, playtesting, iteration, and product development from concept through production. Strong industrial design fundamentals, including sketching, form development, prototyping, visualization, and 3D design tools. Understanding of consumer product devel