iGaming Talent Pulse — Week 38: Entain cuts 400 customer-care roles, IGT names a new CFO, GR8 Tech expands its leadership team, and VBET Group opens a CMO search

A weekly read on hiring, licenses, and executive moves shaping the iGaming labor market — and what each signal means for talent leaders.

💜 by the IDN Recruitment team

This was a week where the split between Western-regulated operators and CIS-facing platforms came into sharp focus. Entain trimmed a fifth of its customer-care workforce under continued UK tax pressure, while IGT refreshed its C-suite with a finance leader pulled from outside gaming entirely — both signs that regulated Western majors are tightening operating models rather than freezing hiring outright. Meanwhile Betsson kept building out its Malta bench with over a hundred open roles, and CIS-origin platforms — GR8 Tech, SoftSwiss, VBET Group — showed no such contraction, expanding leadership teams and posting live vacancies across Warsaw, Tbilisi, Kyiv and Yerevan. For recruiters, the throughline is a talent market moving in two directions at once: contraction in UK-facing consumer operations, expansion in Malta-based leadership and CIS-market platform roles.

1. Entain — cuts up to 400 customer-care jobs, roughly 20% of that 2,000-strong function

Entain has opened a consultation to remove around 400 of its 2,000 customer-care roles, citing the doubled UK Remote Gaming Duty and rising Machine Games Duty pressure, according to Yogonet. CEO Stella David framed the move as necessary to keep the business “competitive, financially resilient, and well positioned for the future.”

Why it matters: This is Entain’s second headcount reduction of 2026 (500 roles were cut in corporate, product and tech functions in July), and it confirms UK tax policy — not demand — is now the primary driver of layoffs among listed operators. For talent leaders, this releases a wave of customer-operations and compliance-adjacent professionals into the market who may not have pure iGaming pedigree but do carry regulated-industry service experience — a strong sourcing pool for BPOs, fintech contact centers, or nearshore support builds at other operators. Expect candidates to hit the market through Q4 as the consultation period closes; operators expanding support capacity in lower-cost hubs should move early to intercept this talent before generalist recruiters do.

2. IGT — appoints Adam Chibib as CFO, succeeding Fabio Celadon

IGT named Adam Chibib as Chief Financial Officer effective November 1, 2026, subject to regulatory approval, with outgoing CFO Fabio Celadon staying on as an advisor through December 31, according to the official announcement. Chibib joins from Raptor Technologies, with prior gaming-sector experience as President and CFO of Multimedia Games, where he helped grow the company from roughly $47 million to over $1 billion in market cap.

Why it matters: IGT reaching outside the gaming sector for financial leadership — rather than promoting a gaming-native executive — signals that operators increasingly value “operational transformation” credentials from broader tech and PE-backed environments over industry tenure. Recruiters running C-suite and finance-director searches for gaming clients should widen sourcing beyond gambling-only candidate pools accordingly. The two-month handover window (through October 31) also creates a short-term opportunity for finance leaders positioning themselves as the “transition-ready” hire at similarly restructuring operators.

3. Betsson — 112 open roles live on its careers board, over 80 of them in Malta, including a Head of AI

Betsson’s Greenhouse-hosted careers page currently lists 112 open positions group-wide, with more than 80 based in Malta, including “Head of AI” and “Head of HR – Support Functions & Malta” as its senior-most live vacancies, per Betsson Group’s careers portal.

Why it matters: While Entain and IGT trim headcount, Betsson is doing the opposite in Malta — a reminder that layoffs this cycle are concentrated in UK-facing consumer operations, not iGaming leadership generally. The “Head of AI” opening is notable: it’s one of the clearest concrete signals yet of Malta-based operators building dedicated AI leadership functions rather than folding AI into existing product or data roles. Recruiters should treat Betsson’s Malta hub as an active landing spot for talent displaced by Entain’s cuts, and expect more “Head of AI” mandates to follow from peer operators over the next two quarters.

4. GR8 Tech — names five new leadership hires ahead of SBC Summit 2026

GR8 Tech, the CIS-origin B2B iGaming platform provider, announced an expanded leadership team ahead of SBC Summit Lisbon (Sept 29–Oct 1): Vitali Bohachuk as Chief Product Officer, Robert Loncar as Head of Casino Product, Gevorg Ghazaryan as Senior Commercial Manager, Iryna Zabolotna as Head of Managed Services, and Sofija Bonasevska as Head of Account Management, according to Yogonet.

Why it matters: Five senior hires in one announcement, timed deliberately ahead of the industry’s biggest B2B trade event, signals GR8 Tech is mounting a serious commercial push to compete with SoftSwiss and BetConstruct for platform-provider market share. The mix of titles — product, casino, commercial, managed services, account management — shows CIS-origin platform vendors building out full go-to-market functions, not just engineering. Recruiters serving B2B iGaming platform clients should expect a wave of comparable commercial and account-management mandates from competing platforms trying to match this buildout before year-end.

5. VBET Group — 24 open roles, including a Chief Marketing Officer search for a new B2B agency launch

VBET Group’s careers page lists 24 open positions, including “Chief Marketing Officer (iGaming B2B Agency Launch)” and “Head of Product” as its senior-most vacancies, alongside risk, BI and HR roles across its Armenia and Sweden/Denmark markets, per VBET Group Careers.

Why it matters: A CMO search explicitly tied to launching a new B2B agency signals VBET is diversifying beyond its core operator business into services for other operators — a meaningful shift for a CIS-origin brand and a fresh mandate type recruiters should watch closely. The concurrent Head of Product opening suggests this is a coordinated leadership build rather than a single backfill, and the geographic spread (Armenia hub plus Nordic market-specific roles) shows VBET recruiting internationally rather than centralizing all senior hiring in one location.

6. SoftSwiss — 62 open roles spanning Poland, Georgia, Malta, Bulgaria and Serbia

SoftSwiss’s careers page currently lists 62 open vacancies across a five-country hub footprint (Poland, Georgia, Malta, Bulgaria, Serbia), with senior engineering roles including “System Engineer/DevOps – Senior” and “Go Engineer – Senior” featured prominently, per SoftSwiss Careers.

Why it matters: SoftSwiss spreading its hiring across five distinct hubs rather than concentrating in one location reflects a broader CIS-facing platform strategy of hedging geopolitical and regulatory risk by not over-indexing on any single jurisdiction. The concentration on senior DevOps/Go engineering signals continued platform-infrastructure investment even as consumer-facing Western operators cut costs — recruiters should note that senior backend/platform engineering remains a seller’s market in this segment regardless of the broader sector’s headline layoffs.

The common thread

This week’s signals split cleanly along a fault line: UK tax policy is forcing consumer-facing Western operators (Entain, and to a lesser extent IGT) to cut and restructure, while Malta-based leadership hiring (Betsson) and CIS-origin B2B platforms (GR8 Tech, SoftSwiss, VBET Group) continue building out commercial, product and engineering benches at real volume — with VBET even launching a new B2B services line. For talent leaders, the practical takeaway is that displaced UK/customer-operations talent and growing CIS/Malta demand are two sides of the same market right now, and the operators who move fastest to connect the two will win the best candidates. IDN spends every week mapping exactly this kind of cross-market movement between Western operators and CIS-facing platforms — if your team is trying to time a search around either side of this shift, we’re glad to compare notes.

IDN Recruitment is a boutique talent partner for tech, data and AI, fintech, and iGaming companies scaling across Europe and the US. The Talent Pulse runs every Monday.