Systems Designer

Overview

Come join Bethesda Game Studios, the award-winning development team behind Starfield, The Elder Scrolls and Fallout. Bethesda Game Studios strives to offer its employees a well-balanced home and work life by providing competitive salaries, a generous benefits program, and offices located in some of North America’s best cities.

With a goal of creating a culture as fun and diverse as our games and our players, we welcome applicants with unique skillsets, experience levels and backgrounds. If you are passionate about making a meaningful contribution to some of the most significant games around, we’d love to hear from you!

We will consider candidates for any of our four Bethesda Game Studios office locations: Rockville, MD; Montreal, Quebec; Austin, TX; Dallas, TX.

Responsibilities

Your Daily Life at Bethesda Game Studios
As Systems Designer, you will…

• Design and maintain our gameplay and world simulation systems, including combat balance numbers, enemy encounter statistics, player and item abilities, in-game economy values, gameplay mechanics tuning, and systemic content scripting
• Use proprietary toolset to implement data and script gameplay and content logic
• Work closely with senior systems designers and leadership to ensure consistency, scope, and quality of content
• Work closely with all departments (Art, Code, Design, Production) to ensure systems meet established goals
• Take on moderately challenging content and features and complete it with occasional supervision.
• Own features or small content package as an Individual Contributor, including providing accurate scope, estimates, evaluating risks as well as the requirements needed.
• Take full responsibility and tests your own content thoroughly and ensures testing by other disciplines is done accurately as well.
• Regularly play game content and provide constructive feedback to fellow designers to help improve the product
• Mentor junior designers with guidance and feedback.
• Maintain existing content and make required bug fixes

Qualifications

What Makes You S.P.E.C.I.A.L.

• You have excellent data management skills and can make sense of how that data interacts with how the game plays and feels
• You are comfortable with programming and/or scripting languages and can make sense of other people’s code/scripts
• You possess excellent communication and documentation skills
• You have strong familiarity with a variety of open world games
• You are self-driven, with a strong focus and attention to detail.
• You generally meet deadlines on or ahead of schedule and can negotiate due dates with leadership as soon as problems arise.
• You can identify less obvious problems from both player feedback and game-related metrics data and provide solutions that mitigate risks all while fitting within some project constraints
• You can work independently and show initiative in reaching out to leadership when you need clarification or have comments.
• You can adapt your designs to the feedback of product owners and communicate the changes and intentions to the team.
• You understand how your content fits into the wider vision of the game and can prioritize your work based on project needs and creative constraints.
• You can effectively pitch your ideas to the team.
• You can represent Design within a cross-discipline feature team.
• You have previous experience shipping, doing updates on or working on AAA games
• You have good knowledge of game design, including hands-on experience with the full life cycle of game development from production to post-launch.
• You have experience with The Elder Scrolls Construction Set or GECK

You must provide a portfolio featuring examples of your work 

Preferred Skills

Bonus Skills

• You have professional Systems Design experience
• You have professional programming or scripting experience
• You have strong familiarity with BGS games

Salary Range

Systems Designer - The typical base pay range for this position at the start of employment is expected to be between $55,000 - $140,000 per year.

ZeniMax has different base pay ranges for different work locations within the United States, which allows us to pay employees competitively and consistently in different geographic markets. The range above reflects the potential base pay across the U.S. for this role; the applicable base pay range will depend on what ultimately is determined to be the candidate’s primary work location. Individual base pay depends on various factors, in addition to primary work location, such as complexity and responsibility of role, job duties/requirements, and relevant experience and skills. Base pay ranges are reviewed and typically updated each year. Offers are made within the base pay range applicable at the time.

At ZeniMax certain roles are eligible for additional rewards, such as merit increases and discretionary bonuses. These awards are allocated based on individual performance and are not guaranteed. Benefits/perks listed here may vary depending on the nature of employment with ZeniMax and the country work location. U.S.-based employees have access to healthcare benefits, a 401(k) plan and company match, short-term and long-term disability coverage, basic life insurance, wellbeing benefits, paid vacation time, paid sick and mental health time, and several paid holidays, among others.

This position is in a union and represented by the Communication Workers of America.

We embrace diversity, equity, and inclusion in everything we do – from recruiting for our studios, publishing and operations to fostering safe and respectful workplaces that encourage collaboration. Our culture is based on principles of respect, inclusion, and fair treatment and we welcome anyone into our family without regard to race, religion, gender identity, sexual orientation, or age.

Our diversity fuels our innovation and inspires us to create game worlds that bring us closer to the global community of players we serve.