Competition Operations Manager

Twitch is the world’s biggest live streaming service, with global communities built around gaming, entertainment, music, sports, cooking, and more. It is where thousands of communities come together for whatever, every day.

We’re about community, inside and out. You’ll find coworkers who are eager to team up, collaborate, and smash (or elegantly solve) problems together. We’re on a quest to empower live communities, so if this sounds good to you, see what we’re up to on LinkedIn and X,  and discover the projects we’re solving on our Blog. Be sure to explore our Interviewing Guide to learn how to ace our interview process.

The Community Originals team at Twitch produces some of the most unique and engaging competitive content in livestreaming. We are looking for a Competition Operations Manager to lead the strategic development and execution of competition formats for Twitch Rivals. This role is critical in ensuring that our events are balanced, operationally sound, fun and engaging for creators and viewers alike.

As a Competition Operations Manager, you will be an expert in translating game mechanics into compelling tournament structures uniquely produced for content creators of varying skill levels. You will work closely with internal teams and external vendors to ensure competitive integrity, mitigate risk, manage quality assurance, and clip worthy experiences that align with our product goals. You are someone who understands the nuances of the creator landscape and can design formats that thrive in a streamer-focused environment vs traditionally competitive environments.

• Develop and Optimize Formats: Create competition formats and game balancing strategies, seeking feedback from stakeholders including internal teams, vendors, publishers, and creator headliners.
• Manage Execution Plans: Proactively manage tournament and production vendors in producing Competition Execution Plans (CEP) and Pre-Morts to ensure all operational risks are identified and mitigated.
• Oversee Team Balancing: Define and execute team balancing rules and vetting processes, particularly in environments without traditional ELO/MMR systems.
• Lead Testing & QA: Coordinate and participate in playtests with vendors and manage the QA testing of custom builds for special events.
• Manage Prizing Payouts: Define prize pool distributions and validate player payouts with internal accounting teams.
• Drive Compliance:  Lead the creation and submission of legal rulesets for each tournament.
• Own Competition Operations: Update, establish, and build competition related processes via team productivity tools like Airtable, Google Suite, and Discord to support all competition related needs.
• Monitor Live Operations: Oversee competition administration during events, participating in escalations and producing incident reports to improve future operations.
• Collaborate Cross-Functionally: Partner with Community Originals, Legal, Accounting, Partnerships, Business Development, and other cross functional teams to ensure seamless event delivery.
• Streamline Scoring: Ability to not only build formats, but understand how to optimize for scoring within each format in order to streamline updates to broadcast and viewers as quickly as possible.

• Experience: 6+ years of experience in competition operations, esports, or professional sports management.
• Experience: 3+ years of experience in producing content creator/streamer focused content.
• Technical Expertise: A deep understanding of how to "min/max" games and adjust formats to meet specific, often nuanced, product goals.
• Analytical Skills: The ability to vet team balance across various game genres in a sometimes skill-nebulous, streamer-focused landscape.
• Project Management: Proven experience managing vendors and production timelines for high-stakes live or online events.
• Communication: Strong verbal and written communication skills, with an ability to communicate complex competitive strategies through comprehensive documentation.

• You have a deep understanding of genre-specific game mechanics (e.g., tactical FPS vs. hero FPS).
• You have experience working directly with high-profile creators and understand their unique needs in a competitive setting.
• You are an active member of the Twitch community and stay ahead of gaming trends.