Director of Gameplay Engineering

Summary

Join Ghost Story Games, an award-winning game development studio, as their Director of Gameplay Engineering. Lead teams in owning and developing game subsystems, driving implementation and adoption. Manage personnel, interface with other teams, and ensure systems receive the necessary attention. Proactively own features, serve as a team touchpoint, and support high-quality game features. Implement tools to streamline QA, support build automation and analytics, and collaborate with all departments. Identify innovative system use cases to enhance the game.

Requirements

• 10+ years’ experience in the game industry with at least 3 shipped AAA titles
• Experience managing teams
• Strong knowledge of C++
• Unreal Engine 4/5 experience is a strong requirement for this position
• Ability to quickly understand existing code and enhance/extend an existing architecture
• Software engineering skills, including the ability to write maintainable and robust code
• Experience developing in and supporting all stages of the development lifecycle
• Ability to architect systems from scratch as well as take over existing systems and extend/maintain them
• Experience developing  games; preferably action, First Person Shooters and immersive sim games
• Ability to research, analyze and optimize code to meet performance requirements
• Experience developing for and shipping cross-platform titles – PC/XSX/PS5 preferred
• Must be eligible to work in the US and willing to relocate to Boston

Responsibilities

• Proactive feature ownership of entire game subsystems – including all aspects of development, maintenance, advocacy and documentation
• Be a team-facing touchpoint for all assigned systems/domains. This would include answering questions, disseminating information to the team, talking over feature requests and evangelizing these systems as appropriate
• Manage and develop teams of programmers for work on assigned systems/domains
• Support high quality and robust game features and systems, by gathering requirements, designing solutions, implementing robust code, testing and debugging
• Implementing tools to streamline the QA process for a highly systemic game
• Support build automation processes as needed
• Support analytics backend development as needed
• Commitment to implementing clean and robust code
• Experience with streaming, serialization, entity systems and core game engine technologies
• Participate in group collaboration and utilize engineering best practices, such as code reviews
• Work with all departments to ensure our systems meet the needs of our content creators
• Ability to identify use cases for our systems and technologies that our content creators haven’t conceived of that can take our game to the next level
• Create efficient, scalable, optimized code while working with 3rd party libraries and tools

Preferred Qualifications

• A passion for hands-on game development with a focus on attention to detail
• Commitment to code quality, documentation and sound testing procedures
• Self-motivated towards solving creative problems
• Able to respond elegantly to difficult creative changes, often late in the process
• Ability to prioritize feature requests to developers and engineers based on design goals
• Experience with First-Person gameplay and systems
• Understanding of procedural design systems in games
• Self-motivated, and able to work independently
• Ability to work well under pressure and with deadlines
• Excellent communication, collaboration, interpersonal, and organizational skills
• Experience with source control via Perforce or equivalent
• C#/python experience a bonus