[Hiring] Senior Gameplay Engineer @Panic Stations

Role Description

We’re looking for a Senior Gameplay Engineer to build fun and vibrant physics-oriented co-op games. The ideal candidate will have great technical foundations and experience. They’re confident working independently while finding the right times to show their work to key stakeholders for early feedback. This is a 12-month contract.

Key Responsibilities

• Gameplay mechanics:
  • Working with designers to build great-feeling player actions, object interactions, and gameplay systems.
  • Success looks like:
    • Features are delivered into the build swiftly for fast feedback and iteration.
    • You have proven experience building and iterating on realtime, action- and character-oriented gameplay mechanics, including character/camera/control and gameplay abilities.
    • You have good intuition for game-feel and player expectation.
    • You’re comfortable working with physics systems to create a fun, satisfying, and parsable gameplay experience.
• Multiplayer networking:
  • You have a good understanding of the relationship between gameplay and networking, ensuring that mechanics work well and feel good under real-world network conditions.
  • Success looks like:
    • Gameplay is developed as online-first and accounts for local client prediction.
    • You consider the technical implications of your work, such as bandwidth usage, impact of latency, etc.
• Self-driven and versatile:
  • You’ll need to have conversations with designers/artists/other engineers to kick off development of a feature and then jump into the code.
  • We avoid heavy design docs, so there will be gaps in specification. You’ll have strong first principles to draw from, and a good instinct for what will work or feel best.
  • If there are key decisions to be made that could have huge implications for the game, you know to reach out and get agreement.
  • You’ll also be empowered to get stuck in wherever is necessary. We don’t have a build team or a character specialist.
  • Success looks like:
    • You can turn high-level ideas into implementations.
    • You focus on delivery. You get work into the build promptly and know when work is “done enough.”
    • You don’t allow development to drift. If work is taking too long or lack of clarity is putting a feature at risk, you take action.

Qualifications

• 4+ years game development experience.
• Shipped realtime networked multiplayer games.
• Proven experience working on action-oriented, character-based gameplay.
• Well-versed in all areas of Unity + C# development.
• Experience working on a team using Git.
• Comfortable working in a small, fast-moving team.

Requirements

• Please note: This is a 12-month contract, remote-working position, open to anyone within the UK & Europe.

Benefits

• 2-week company summer break.
• 2-week winter break to rest and recharge.
• Normal holiday allowance.