Google DeepMind promotes games and AI research veteran to director

Alexandre Moufarek's promotion to Director of Product Management reflects how games have become central to frontier AI research at one of the world's leading AI labs.

Alexandre Moufarek (right) at the GDC Festival of Gaming 2026 Luminaries Speakers Series, where he appeared alongside Zhen Z, Bryan Catanzaro, Ross O'Dwyer, and Julien Merceron to discuss gaming and AI Image credit: Alexandre Moufarek

Google DeepMind has promoted Alexandre Moufarek to Director of Product Management, recognizing nearly a decade of work spanning AI agent research, foundation model data strategy, and the company's games-as-research program.

Moufarek, who joined DeepMind in 2017 after more than a decade in the games industry, now leads product within the Inception team, which the company describes as exploring breakthrough experiences alongside frontier research to create experiences that would not be possible without AI. He also leads a creative and technical team partnering with game developers to push the boundary of AI and games.

He announced the promotion on LinkedIn, writing that he joined DeepMind to help set up Worlds, "a team of ex-game devs building next-generation research simulations," and that games have "always had a special place in my life, for work and play."

From game developer to AI research

Before joining DeepMind, Moufarek spent more than four years as Associate Producer at Ubisoft in Paris, working on Watch Dogs and Ghost Recon Future Soldier, leading cross-functional teams of up to 50 people and presenting at E3 on multiple occasions. He subsequently served as Software Director at Aldebaran, part of SoftBank Group, where he led the software project for the B2C launch of the Pepper robot in Japan, overseeing a team of 120 people across 16 Scrum teams. He then moved to Novaquark as Production Director on Dual Universe, a single-shard sandbox MMORPG that ran a successful Kickstarter campaign and was revealed at E3 2016.

That production background informed his transition into AI research environments, where the complexity and open-endedness of games provided what Moufarek describes as "the perfect proving ground for AI research — rich, complex, open-ended worlds that demand the kind of intelligence we're building at DeepMind."

Gemini, SIMA, and Genie

At DeepMind, Moufarek has worked across several of the lab's most prominent research programs. When Gemini was in early development, he was brought in to lead the program's data strategy, with a mandate he summarized on LinkedIn as: "Make it good, yeah?" He also worked with SIMA, DeepMind's embodied agent research program, to build a games portfolio for research in partnership with external developers, and has since been involved with the Genie foundation world model work, with further projects referenced but not yet named publicly.

Moufarek also serves as a board director at IntoBridge.com, a role he has held since January 2021. In his LinkedIn post, he credited Adrian Bolton for nearly a decade of mentorship, and acknowledged DeepMind co-founders Demis Hassabis and Shane Legg.

The Inception team's focus on AI-first experiences developed alongside frontier research places it at the intersection of consumer product and fundamental capability building, an area that has become increasingly relevant as AI labs look to translate research advances into deployable, interactive applications.