Lead Engineer

Who We Are: 

Ghost Story Games is a self-publishing game development studio founded by Ken Levine (Creative Director of System Shock 2, Bioshock, and Bioshock Infinite) and former Irrational Games developers. The studio’s mission is to create narrative-driven experiences rooted in immersive world building and gameplay. 

The Challenge: 

Ghost Story Games is seeking a talented Lead Engineer to join us on Judas, the highly anticipated game led by Ken Levine (System Shock 2, BioShock series). Unique in its bold, creative vision, Judas is also built upon novel technology by which the visual world, gameplay, and story unfolds in meaningful, dynamic ways. The result is a significant and personal journey adapted to each player’s experience and offers a new approach to the art and storytelling of video games. 

We are looking for a Lead Engineer with a diverse set of technical game development skills and experience to help support our dynamic gameplay and narrative systems within the deep narrative worlds that we aim to deliver with each of our games. Candidates will be expected to lead teams owning entire subsystems in our game, driving forward their implementation and adoption as well as developing and maintaining roadmaps, managing personnel and interfacing with other teams/disciplines. This person will need to ensure that these systems receive the level of attention and care that will bring our games to the next level. 

What You’ll Take On: 

• 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. 
• 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.

What You Bring:

• 7+ years’ experience in the game industry with at least 2 shipped AAA titles.
• Experience managing teams. 
• Strong knowledge of C++. 
• C#/python experience a bonus. 
• 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. 
• Experience developing for games; preferably action, First Person Shooters.
• Ability to research, analyze and optimize code to meet performance requirements.
• Experience developing for and shipping cross-platform titles – PC/XSX/PS5 preferred. 

Great to Have: 

• 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 well 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. 
• Must be eligible to work in the US. 

When Applying For This Position: 

Please watch the following GDC talk given by Ken Levine: 

http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1020434/Narrative