Principal Game Programmer (Unreal Engine, AI)

What it means on a daily basis​

• Monitor the technical health of multiple projects, working closely with technical leads to surface risks early, prevent bottlenecks, and keep deliveries on track.

• Define and enforce studio-wide coding standards, architectural patterns, and engineering workflows, and drive their adoption across programming teams.

• Lead high-impact R&D initiatives, with particular focus on AI applied to game development, and ensure successful integration of outcomes into production pipelines.

• Provide hands-on technical guidance and mentoring to programmers, conducting periodic competency assessments and building clear development paths.

• Act as the primary technical counterpart for co-development partner studios, aligning on architecture, tooling, style guides, and Unreal toolchain standardization across shared pipelines.

• Collaborate cross-functionally with Game Design, Art, and Production to improve how programming integrates with other disciplines and contributes to overall product quality.

• Strategic resource planning and project allocation in partnership with the Studio Technical Director.

 WHAT YOU NEED TO SUCCEED​

• Proven hands-on expertise in game development across multiple genres and platforms, including mobile, PC, and console.

• High proficiency in Unreal Engine 5 and programming languages such as C++ and C#.

• Demonstrated ability to design and lead large-scale technical systems, covering areas such as 3D rendering, AI gameplay systems, online and network scalability, and cloud infrastructure.

• A track record of leading R&D initiatives from exploration through to production integration.

• Demonstrated leadership of multi-disciplinary programming teams, including identifying skill gaps, building development plans, and raising the collective output quality of a department rather than just individual projects.

• The ability to communicate technical direction clearly to senior leadership, partner studio counterparts, and non-technical collaborators, and to influence decisions at a strategic level while maintaining alignment across stakeholders.

• Practical experience deploying AI and LLM-based tools in a production context.

WHO YOU ARE

• Think in systems and long-term consequences, not just immediate fixes.

• Proactive technical authority who anticipates what teams and partners will need before they ask.

• Invested in developing others: raising the technical floor of a department matters as much as personal output.

• Hold grounds in complex stakeholder environments, with clear, inclusive communication.

• Hands-on by choice on the most strategic and complex challenges, not only in meetings.

• Balances technical rigor with product thinking: treats quality, security, and compliance as conditions for sustainable creativity.

• Steady and focused when priorities shift or organizational context changes.