Head of Product & Monetization

Location: Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates Who We Are YallaPlay is a venture-backed mobile games studio of about 25 people, headquartered in Abu Dhabi with team members in Brazil and Europe. We build and operate card games: our flagship, Spades Masters, has grown consistently for years and is played by millions. We are building toward a portfolio of card games, including Arabic-first titles for the MENA region, operated on one shared technology and LiveOps platform. We reinvent classic card and board games with fresh mechanics, beautiful design, and social features that bring people together. Small team, big ambition, direct communication. Join us and be part of building something big from the ground up. The Opportunity We are looking for a Head of Product & Monetization to lead the performance, roadmap, execution, and player experience of YallaPlay’s game portfolio. You will be the most senior product leader in the company, reporting directly to the CEO and partnering with him on every major product bet. You own what we build and why: product strategy, roadmap, monetization, economy, LiveOps strategy, product requirements, and KPI outcomes across our live games. You will lead the Product function and manage the Producer and Art Lead, ensuring Product, Production, and Art are aligned around the right roadmap, clear priorities, strong execution, high quality standards, and measurable game outcomes. This is a high-autonomy role. We are looking for someone who forms their own conclusions from data and arrives with proposals, not questions. You will not be judged by the number of documents you produce. You will be judged by the quality of your decisions, the speed of execution, the clarity of priorities, and the measurable improvement of our games. This position is based at our offices in Yas Island, Abu Dhabi, UAE. Remote will be considered for the right candidate with Gulf-hours overlap. What You’ll Be Doing Own the product roadmap and KPI outcomes for our live titles: revenue, ARPDAU, retention, LTV, conversion, engagement, and economy health. Own product discovery, prioritization logic, product requirements, feature rationale, success metrics, and post-launch decisions for major game changes. Lead monetization and economy strategy: IAP catalog and pricing, offer segmentation, season passes, VIP programs, collection systems, ad monetization, and the balance between ads and IAP. Own the LiveOps strategy across events, offers, seasonal content, player segmentation, and content cadence, ensuring LiveOps is measured and connected to retention, monetization, and long-term game health. Guide game systems and product design: progression, rewards, player journeys, UX, economy changes, and monetization experiments, using dashboards, A/B tests, player behavior, and competitor analysis to decide what to build, cut, scale, or rework. Manage the Producer and Art Lead, ensuring Product, Production, and Art are aligned with clear ownership, realistic roadmaps, on-time delivery, strong execution, and visual quality that matches the bar of the genre. Establish lightweight product discipline: assumption documentation before build, design review gates, KPI reviews after launch, and post-mortems. Build the operating rhythm across Product, Production, Art, Engineering, BI, UA, VIP Support, and AdMon: roadmap reviews, LiveOps planning, prioritization, trade-off decisions, and performance follow-ups. Identify team gaps, quality issues, process weaknesses, and resourcing needs, and drive practical fixes. What We’re Looking For What you need to have: 10+ years in mobile free-to-play games, the majority in product roles on live titles. Hands-on monetization systems experience: you have personally designed offer systems, passes, VIP economies, IAP catalogs, or similar systems and can reason about their math in detail. Ownership of revenue or retention targets for a live game, with results you can speak to. Strong analytical fluency: comfortable in dashboards, cohorts, funnels, and A/B results, and able to pull your own numbers when needed. Strong product judgment across game systems, player journeys, progression, rewards, UX, LiveOps, economy, and monetization. Experience leading cross-functional teams across product, production, design, and art, including managing experienced leads without absorbing their jobs. Clear, direct communication in English, and comfort working with a multicultural remote team across time zones. Strong execution judgment: able to simplify roadmaps, cut low-value work, resolve trade-offs, and push teams toward measurable outcomes. Strong Advantage: Depth in card, board, casual, or real-time multiplayer games. Experience managing both product and creative/art functions. VIP and whale engagement, segmentation, and personalized monetization. Ad mediation, placement strategy, and ad revenue optimization. Taking games from soft launch to global launch and live operations. Familiarity with MENA markets or Arabic. Unity and mobile production pipelines; SQL or similar data skills. The Person Who Will Succeed in This Role You are not only a strategist. You are an operator. You can look at a dashboard and spot what matters. You can review a roadmap and immediately see what is bloated, weak, or missing. You can sit with artists and discuss visual quality, then move to a KPI review and challenge monetization assumptions. You can tell the CEO what is working, what is not, and what needs to happen next, in two minutes. You are comfortable making decisions with incomplete information. You move fast, but not blindly. You are direct, practical, and accountable. You do not wait for the perfect process before acting. Why YallaPlay What You Get A senior compensation package. Relocation support and UAE visa sponsorship for Abu Dhabi; remote flexibility for the right candidate. Direct partnership with the CEO and genuine decision authority. A funded company with multi-year runway and a profitable flagship game. The chance to shape a multi-game studio's product practice from the ground up. Generous paid time off, your birthday off, and a learning budget. How We Hire Intro conversation, then a product craft deep-dive, then a short practical exercise based on real anonymized product data, then team conversations, references, and offer. We move quickly and tell you where you stand at every step. When you apply, please include your CV and, where possible, examples of games, features, LiveOps, monetization systems, or performance improvements you have led. YallaPlay is an equal-opportunity employer. We welcome applicants of all backgrounds and nationalities.