Lead Systems Designer

Description

What we are looking for:

A Lead Systems Designer, to lead, manage, and mentor other systems designers. You will also collaborate across disciplines, hold a cohesive vision for systems design throughout the game, and offer the team your strong analytical skills to solve a variety of design-related challenges. Positioned at the forefront of tuning and balancing efforts, you will decipher data and recommend how best to ensure we provide players with a fantastic metagame experience across all of our systems. You have a strong passion for managing others, a proven track record shipping titles with well-designed systems, and an unparalleled knowledge of systems in across a wide variety of games.

Requirements

What we will do together:

• Unify, motivate, mentor and manage metagame and systems designers. You will lead and directly manage a formidable team of designers, and serve as a mentor to other designers across the team. You will lead by example in the way you interact with the rest of the team, push for quality while problem-solving development challenges, and champion the vision for the game.
• Build a best-In-class systems design team. You will work with HR, recruiting, and other managers to identify and fill talent gaps, grow talent, set performance benchmarks, develop clear career paths within systems design, establish best practices, and hire industry-leading talent. Most importantly, you will establish and enforce a healthy culture within system design that emphasizes problem solving, collaboration, player-facing development, and unwavering support for the overall vision.
• Collaborate to deliver on the game’s vision. You will work closely with Directors and other Design Leads to refine and deliver on the vision for all major systems. You will also collaborate with user experience, level, gameplay, and content teams to ensure a cohesive, rewarding, and ever-evolving player experience.
• Drive the design of best-in-class systems. You’ll provide vision and technical guidance across the metagame experience, including matchmaking systems, ELO algorithms and theories, skill systems, currencies and economy, and game balance.
• Serve as the voice of systems design across the project. You will communicate with Leads, Directors, and – most importantly – across team structures and disciplines to ensure that everyone understands the goals, designs, and progress of the systems design team.
• Advocate for the player. You will critically and ruthlessly evaluate all aspects of systems design from the player’s point of view. You will also provide constructive criticism across all other areas of design to ensure that the design team is always putting the player experience first.
• Drive Quality with Urgency. You will work with the systems design team to ensure we introduce features and content to players as efficiently and quickly as possible.
• Solve Problems. Using your deep understanding of systems design, you will assess challenges and offer solutions to ensure that the game’s vision is achieved.

What you will bring:

• An ambitious, quality-first mindset. You believe the best idea wins and are optimistic that there are always ways to bring those ideas to life despite real-world constraints. You push hard for quality and understand that we must build a game that players love, not just like.

• Strong Managerial experience. You have recruited, built and led design teams to successful outcomes, managed employees through difficult challenges, grown your direct reports, and mentored others on large, cross-discipline teams.
• A Proven Track Record for Solving Hard Problems. You have demonstrable experience not only identifying challenges, concerns, and deficiencies early, but also successfully proposing, refining, and enacting solutions, with at least two shipped AAA titles working in a systems design capacity. You can speak credibly and from a position of experience about a wide range of design challenges.
• Deep Knowledge of Systems Design. You have a professional understanding of the many major metagame systems found in contemporary game titles, and a keen knowledge for how those systems work.
• Exceptional Communication Skills. You can convey your thoughts, opinions, and direction clearly, articulately, and concisely in both verbal and written formats.
• Expert knowledge of off-the-shelf design tools. You are well-versed in creating and managing data, and have expertise with Unreal Engine (UE5 preferred).

Benefits

Interested… a bit about Escape Velocity:

Escape Velocity is a team of passionate, talented developers working at a studio that offers excellent benefits, on what we believe is a once-in-a-career project with a committed publisher. But that doesn’t necessarily make us unique. What does make us special? We value the time, energy, and talent of our players and our colleagues. We want every hour spent developing and playing our games to be an incredibly rewarding and worthwhile use of your time. To that end, we are ‘Fully Remote’ and support team members nearly anywhere in the world. We prioritize honesty, even when that means sharing bad news. We strive to give everyone autonomy so they can determine how best to work and play, and we care more about what you bring to the game and studio than how many hours you’re clocking. We’re dedicated to building a culture of play, which not only makes us better game makers, but also strengthens the bonds between us all. We believe in constant improvement across all areas – from the game itself to our production design – and are constantly re-evaluating how we spend our time to ensure that we’re not wasting yours and we’re all always working on the most important things.

A few benefits you can expect from us:

• A generous PTO allowance
• Summer and Winter holidays studio closure (separate to PTO allowance)
• Private Medical & Dental Healthcare
• Private Mental Health scheme
• A generous annual Health & Wellbeing allowance
• Discretionary Studio Bonus
• Top range tech for your home set up
• Other benefits based on your region