Engineering Manager

Ghost Story Games is a self-publishing game development studio founded by Ken Levine (Creative Director of System Shock 2, Bioshock, and Bioshock Infinite) and former Irrational Games developers.  The studio’s mission is to create narrative-driven experiences rooted in immersive world building and gameplay. 

Ghost Story Games is seeking a talented Engineering Manager to join us on Judas, the highly anticipated game led by Ken Levine (System Shock 2, BioShock series). Unique in its bold, creative vision, Judas is also built upon novel technology by which the visual world, gameplay, and story unfolds in meaningful, dynamic ways. The result is a significant and personal journey adapted to each player’s experience and offers a new approach to the art and storytelling of video games.

We are seeking an Engineering Manager with a diverse background in game development to lead the finalization and polish of our dynamic gameplay and narrative systems. In this critical leadership role, you will oversee engineering teams, own major subsystems, take charge of the strategic planning, execution, and optimization required to bring these systems to a "shipping-ready" state. Beyond technical oversight, you will be responsible for developing and maintaining technical roadmaps, managing and mentoring engineering personnel, and serving as a key liaison to foster seamless collaboration with other studio disciplines.

The ideal candidate brings a proven track record of driving complex game systems through to launch, pairing strong technical acumen with the meticulous care and leadership necessary to elevate our games to the next level.

• Own hardening our systems to shipping quality.

• Roadmap and schedule post-launch release content.

• Proactive feature ownership of entire game subsystems – including all aspects of development, maintenance, advocacy and documentation.

• Manage the schedule of the console port team (with our vendor) and all performance/optimization efforts.

• Manage and develop teams of programmers for work on assigned systems/domains which includes managing contractors and outsourcing partners.

• Work with all departments to ensure our systems meet the needs of our content creators.

• Extensive Unreal Engine 4/5 experience.

• Ability to direct the closing down of dynamic systems and develop a change management process for feature maintenance.

• Experience with streaming, serialization, entity systems and core game engine technologies.

• 10+ years’ experience in the game industry with at least 3 shipped AAA titles.

• Experience managing teams.

• Strong knowledge of C++.

• Ability to quickly understand existing code and enhance/extend an existing architecture.

• Software engineering skills, including the ability to write maintainable and robust code.

• Experience developing in and supporting all stages of the development lifecycle.

• Experience developing games; preferably action, First Person Shooters and immersive sim games.

• Ability to research, analyze and optimize code to meet performance requirements.

• Experience developing for and shipping cross-platform titles – PC/XSX/PS5 preferred.

• A passion for hands-on game development with a focus on attention to detail.

• Commitment to code quality, documentation and sound testing procedures.

• Adaptable in high-pressure, creative environments, with the ability to respond elegantly to difficult changes and prioritize feature requests based on design goals.

• Understanding of procedural content generation systems/algorithms.

• Self-motivated leader able to work independently and drive results.

• Excellent communication, collaboration, interpersonal, and organizational skills, including participation in engineering best practices like code reviews.

• Experience with source control via Perforce or equivalent.

• Support high quality and robust game features and systems, by gathering requirements, designing solutions, testing and debugging.

• Implementing AI tools to streamline the QA process for a highly systemic game.

• Support build automation processes as needed.

• Support analytics backend development.

• C#/python experience.

Please watch the following GDC talk given by Ken Levine: http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1020434/Narrative