Responsibilities
- Lead an Engineering Team: Guide, mentor, and grow a team of engineers — setting technical direction, supporting their development, and fostering a high-trust, high-output environment.
- Architect Core Game Systems: Design, develop, and lead the implementation of major systems and foundational technologies for our games, balancing hands-on contribution with team oversight.
- Define Technical Strategy in Ambiguity: Navigate complex game development challenges and technical unknowns. Identify key technical risks and opportunities, define strategic approaches, and create robust, scalable technical designs your team can execute against.
- Drive Delivery & Execution: Plan, prioritize, and shepherd your team's work — breaking down ambiguous goals into clear milestones, unblocking engineers, and ensuring high-quality, on-time delivery.
- Champion Performance & Quality: Uphold a high bar for maintainable, performant code through code review, technical standards, and a culture of continuous improvement.
- Cross-Disciplinary Leadership: Partner closely with engineering leadership, game designers, artists, producers, and other discipline leads to translate creative visions into concrete technical roadmaps and high-performance solutions.
- Establish Engineering Best Practices: Help shape and embody a culture of technical excellence, collaboration, and iterative development across the engineering organization.
- Own Critical Technical Domains: Take accountability for complex technical areas vital to our games' success, driving their evolution, stability, and performance through your team.
- Proactive Problem Solving: Anticipate and address technical challenges, performance bottlenecks, architectural limitations, and potential scaling issues before they impact development or players.
- Hire & Grow the Team: Participate in recruiting, interviewing, and onboarding engineers as the team scales.
- Other tasks related or beneficial to the above or the work of the Company.
Requirements
- Proven experience leading engineering teams — including direct mentorship, technical guidance, and growing engineers' careers — while staying meaningfully hands-on in code.
- Expert-level development experience using C/C++/C#, with mastery in building complex, performant, real-time systems.
- Significant experience architecting and developing core systems for complex, interactive applications.
- Deep proficiency with real-time engines, including experience modifying or extending engine systems to suit unique application needs.
- Demonstrated ability to design, document, and implement complex, scalable, and maintainable software architectures, especially in new or evolving domains.
- Track record of thriving in fast-paced, ambiguous environments — defining technical direction, making critical decisions with incomplete information, and leading projects with significant scope from inception to ship.
- Strong project leadership skills: scoping, planning, prioritization, and shipping under real-world constraints.
- Exceptional ability to communicate complex technical ideas clearly and collaborate effectively with diverse teams (technical and non-technical) in a dynamic, potentially remote setting.
- A genuine commitment to mentorship, team growth, and building a positive engineering culture.
Nice to Have
- 10+ years of professional software engineering experience, with at least 5 years in game development and prior experience as a Lead, Tech Lead, or Engineering Manager.
- Multiple shipped commercial game titles with demonstrable contributions to core engine systems or foundational architecture, ideally in a leadership capacity.
- Experience hiring and scaling engineering teams.
- Contributions to game development communities — GDC talks, published technical writing, or open-source projects.
- Experience leading distributed teams across multiple time zones with asynchronous collaboration workflows.
