Design Lead

Overview

The Player Achievement team’s mission is to create systems and support feature development that deepens and extends player engagement, providing players with a strong sense of narrative fantasy for the Marathon universe and driving aspirational motivations. Our systems work begins from a player’s initial orientation into the game and continues through to Marathon’s elder game.

This role will be responsible for driving the creative and technical implementation of these engagement and achievement features. As a Systems Design Lead, you will work closely with the M&M Leadership group and other Area Design Leads to chart out Marathon’s systems roadmap to answer product goals and engage players within the extraction community. You will drive design alignment and collaboration across creative disciplines, ensuring a holistic experience for player engagement features in relation to progression, economy, narrative, and core gameplay. You will lead a small team to deliver those systems, unblocking and empowering all members of the team and leading collaboration with partner teams.

RESPONSIBILITIES

• Build a compelling Systems Feature roadmap for Player Achievement that details a clear relationship with all areas of design
• Drive, coordinate, empower, and unblock Systems teams
• Ensure the design team's work is achievable by guiding them to appropriately adjust scope based on technical realities
• Work closely with the Leadership Team to set guidelines for implementation of the Marathon IP via the extraction shooter genre
• Support the work of cross-discipline teams to understand and execute on what is best for the game
• Maintain Marathon IP quality and consistency by employing strong player experience design principles
• Leading the communication and “why” behind systems design decisions to your small team
• Ownership of features and development of design decisions with partner teams

REQUIRED SKILLS

• Previous experience as a Systems Design Lead or Systems Designer on a AAA or large-scale game
• Experience designing, documenting, and building player engagement game systems, ideally including progressions, quests and objective work, elder game, and achievement systems
• Intuitive understanding of what motivates player behavior and engagement, and why players seek challenge and progression
• Excitement for collaboration with designers, artists, programmers, audio professionals, quality assurance and producers to achieve a common goal, no matter where they are
• Ability to creatively align with the team and then take initiative locally and externally
• Social intelligence, great interpersonal skills, and empathy for creative teams
• Ability to handle ambiguity, including giving and handling feedback despite that ambiguity

NICE-TO-HAVE SKILLS

• Experience designing features in an extraction genre or competitive shooter
• Experience hiring, training, and managing other Designers