House of How Games is seeking a Lead Unreal Engineer for a 6-month contract position with potential for full-time employment on a new internally developed AAA title. The role involves leading a team in designing, creating, debugging, maintaining, and optimizing games, editors, and tools using Unreal Engine. The successful candidate will direct system scheduling and design, participate in implementation, and coordinate with other disciplines to ensure project success and quality experiences.

Must Have

• Lead game development on a project in Unreal and supporting pipelines.
• Participate in and lead a team through all aspects of game development, including planning, design, implementation, documentation, and maintenance.
• Help structure overall game architecture, plus implement gameplay features, localization, tooling, UI systems, etc.
• Assist in performance tuning, balancing improvement, automation, and usability.
• Follow coding standards, write clean code with a constant eye on performance.
• Take ownership and be the technical expert of features and systems, driving from prototype to a highly polished production state.
• Improve, make suggestions, and raise the bar on any code and processes you work with.
• Create accurate estimates to facilitate predictable development.
• Help identify team technical needs, and participate in the interview process.
• Lead code reviews.
• Mentor junior programmers.
• Document development processes.
• Produce prototypes of gameplay ideas and features.
• 10+ years experience in game development as a software engineer or equivalent.
• Shipped at least one full AA/AAA game as a developer.
• Exceptional knowledge of Unreal and fluency in C++.
• Strong fundamental skills in architecture, development, and debugging.
• Solid understanding of design patterns and data structures.
• Strong analytical and formal thinking, able to break problems down in their key variables.
• Experience and comfort with detailed and accurate project planning.
• Experience in managing other developers and/or small teams.
• Ability to offer mentorship to more junior developers on the team.
• Proficiency in source control systems such as Perforce or Git.
• Written and spoken English fluency.
• Cleared to work and located in the United States or Canada.

Good to Have

• Proficiency with C/C# JavaScript, TypeScript, Python, or other development languages.
• Mobile or web development experience.
• Game development experience in Unity or other engines.
• Shipped a game on consoles.
• Familiarity with AI coding assistants such as Claude.

Perks & Benefits

• Competitive salaries regardless of location
• Industry-leading healthcare coverage
• Flexible time-off policy
• Comprehensive dental/vision/life/AD&D/parental leave benefits
• Discretionary bonus opportunities
• 401(k) with matching
• Social clubs
• Career development events
• 10 days of accrued paid time-off, increased to 15 days after three years of employment
• 14 paid House of How-observed holidays annually
• 2.5 paid floating holidays annually, prorated in the first year of employment based on start date

Lead Unreal Engineer

• Contract
• Remote US / Canada

We believe that a universe without fun would be a pretty dull place to exist… and that games are the best medium in the world to provide that fun. We love games which is why we make games. We make games to be a part of providing that outlet for escape, competition, exploration, social connection and so much more to a global audience of 3B+ players and growing.

We believe in authentic leadership, real conversations, making decisions, learning from mistakes but always continuing to move forward. We don’t want big company politics. We just want to do our best work with good people and have fun doing what we love.

We believe that our team performs best when everyone shows up as their authentic full self and we strive to empower everyone in the studio to be a game-maker. We encourage everyone to have an entrepreneurial mindset and we foster continuous learning and innovation.

In a time of so much industry consolidation, House of How is proud to be fully independent. We are based out of Seattle, Washington with remote game-makers all across North America, from British Columbia to New England, and we have a satellite studio in Boden, Sweden.

Starting out as colleagues at Microsoft Games, our leads worked with each other for years before setting out on a new adventure together. From humble beginnings, we grew slowly and carefully to ensure we could control our own destiny. We are now at 75+ people and growing rapidly as our industry reputation is bringing more and more projects to the studio. Come join our team and be part of the amazing growth story of House of How Games and help us to entertain the planet!

Job Description

We are seeking a Lead Unreal Engineer to lead a team of developers in designing, creating, debugging, maintaining and optimizing our games, editors, and other related tools used for game development. You will direct the scheduling and design of systems and participate in the implementation of these systems to drive quality experiences that make our games great!

You should have a broad knowledge of Unreal game engine technologies and tools, a keen ability to create and meet estimates, and a good sense for the tradeoff between performance, flexibility, and ease of implementation.

As a lead, you should also have a track record of coordinating with other disciplines and managing deliverables for multiple people on your team, creating processes and an environment that sets the project and your team of engineers up for success.

Project Details

You will join us as a Lead Unreal Engineer on a new internally developed AAA title.

You’ll work closely with our Tech Design Director, who has over 20 years of experience and shipped games like Gears of War 2/3, and was an early member of both Kinect and Hololens helping define new gameplay paradigms in new mediums, contributing to several titles.

This is a 6-month contract position with potential for full-time employment based on the success of the prototype.

Responsibilities

• Lead game development on a project in Unreal and supporting pipelines.
• Participate in and lead a team through all aspects of game development, including planning, design, implementation, documentation, and maintenance.
• Help structure overall game architecture, plus implement gameplay features, localization, tooling, UI systems, etc., as needed.
• Assist in performance tuning, balancing improvement, automation, and usability.
• Follow coding standards, write clean code with a constant eye on performance.
• Take ownership and be the technical expert of features and systems, driving from prototype to a highly polished production state.
• Improve, make suggestions, and raise the bar on any code and processes you work with.
• Create accurate estimates to facilitate predictable development.
• Help identify team technical needs, and participate in the interview process.
• Lead code reviews.
• Mentor junior programmers.
• Document development processes.
• Produce prototypes of gameplay ideas and features.

Requirements

• 10+ years experience in game development as a software engineer or equivalent, in collaboration with other technical and non-technical disciplines.
• Shipped at least one full AA/AAA game as a developer.
• Exceptional knowledge of Unreal and fluency in C++.
• Strong fundamental skills in architecture, development, and debugging.
• Solid understanding of design patterns and data structures.
• Strong analytical and formal thinking, able to break problems down in their key variables and identify the relations between them.
• Experience and comfort with detailed and accurate project planning.
• Experience in managing other developers and/or small teams.
• Ability to offer mentorship to more junior developers on the team.
• Proficiency in source control systems such as Perforce or Git.
• Written and spoken English fluency.
• Cleared to work and located in the United States or Canada.

Bonus Qualifications

• Proficiency with C/C# JavaScript, TypeScript, Python, or other development languages.
• Mobile or web development experience.
• Game development experience in Unity or other engines.
• Shipped a game on consoles.
• Familiarity with AI coding assistants such as Claude

Compensation

Although we’re a relatively small-and-growing remote team, we work hard to offer competitive salaries regardless of location, as well as industry-leading healthcare coverage, flexible time-off policy, comprehensive dental/vision/life/AD&D/parental leave benefits, discretionary bonus opportunities, 401(k) with matching, social clubs, career development events, and much more.

In addition, House of How employees also receive:

• 10 days of accrued paid time-off, increased to 15 days after three years of employment
• 14 paid House of How-observed holidays annually
• 2.5 paid floating holidays annually, prorated in the first year of employment based on start date

The base pay ranges for this role in Washington state and California, enumerated by rank, are as follows:

Washington & California State Pay Range

Engineering Manager: $110,000—$140,000 USD

Senior Engineering Manager: $130,000—$180,000 USD

Group Engineering Manager: $150,000—$220,000 USD

Engineering Director: $170,000—$240,000 USD

Senior Developer: $90,000—$130,000 USD

Senior Developer II: $110,000—$150,000 USD

Senior Developer III: $130,000—$180,000 USD

Principal Developer: $150,000—$200,000 USD

These ranges are determined by a multiplicity of competing factors, including work experience, transferable skills, training, business needs, and market demands. In other locations, these pay ranges may be adjusted, and they are subject to change.