Gardens

Game Engineer

• Prototype, iterate, and maintain creature behaviors and abilities for both combat and non-combat scenarios in an online multiplayer environment.
• Own the implementation and continuous maintenance of creature behaviors using Unreal Behaviors Trees and Blackboards from prototyping to polish.
• Collaborate with engineers, artists, animators, and audio designers to bring your creature designs to the player experience.
• Own creatures, their abilities, and their behaviors while staying aligned with gameplay design and leadership.
• Collaborate with cross-disciplinary partners to align creature design with art, narrative, 3C’s gameplay, and technical requirements.
• Balance and tune difficulty and behavior to create engaging encounters for multiplayer situations.
• Advocate for the player experience, ensuring creature interactions are fun, surprising, and memorable.
• Partner with Animation to tune movement sets and provide pathfinding logic to ensure locomotion feels grounded and purposeful.
• Act as a key bridge between Art/Animation and Engineering to troubleshoot visual state logic and optimize creature performance.

Gameplay Designer, Creatures

Engineering Manager

• Own the people management of the engineering team through regular one-on-ones, design reviews, and feedback sessions.
• Partner daily with creative leadership, production, art, and design to ensure engineering execution is aligned with milestone goals and upcoming roadmap milestones.
• Own workload balancing and sustainable production practices for the engineering team.
• Ensure Directors’ feedback is heard and actioned upon, and that iteration and progress trends toward established success criteria.
• Represent and advocate for the engineering team in cross-disciplinary discussions, clearly communicating resource constraints, tradeoffs, and intent.
• Hold the team accountable to defined standards of excellence, including problem-solving quality, velocity, and delivery against agreed timelines.
• Directly manage gameplay and backend engineers, including performance management, feedback, and career development.
• Partner with the Tech Director, CCO, and creative leads to support game stability and execution against the overall vision.
• Establish and maintain clear team goals, execution processes, and operational best practices for engineering.
• Be accountable for the delivery of engineering commitments in collaboration with production.
• Support the technical pipeline by ensuring dependencies, risks, and resourcing needs are surfaced and addressed.
• Participate in hiring by assessing team fit, growth needs, and onboarding readiness.
• Foster a healthy, inclusive, and collaborative team culture aligned with Gardens’ values.
• Lead the team through ambiguity, ensuring progress on high-impact, complex initiatives.