Lead Game Programmer

Our firm is partnering with an award-winning independent game development studio to hire a Lead Programmer who will drive day-to-day technical leadership across a flagship narrative-driven title and multiple internal pipelines.

This role is responsible for translating high-level technical direction into actionable implementation plans, leading execution, and ensuring systems, tools, and workflows remain stable, scalable, and aligned with production needs. The Lead Programmer will collaborate closely with the Technical Director and cross-functional leadership spanning design, narrative, art, production, and QA to support both in-development projects and live operations.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead day-to-day technical execution for a flagship project while providing oversight across additional pipelines such as LiveOps, localization, modding support, and internal tools.
• Coordinate and support a team of engineers and technical contributors, ensuring clear ownership, accountability, and delivery.
• Own technical planning across features and pipelines, aligning scope, timelines, risks, and technical debt management with production goals.
• Provide hands-on support through implementation, debugging, and code reviews to unblock team members.
• Establish and maintain coding standards, review processes, and best practices to ensure long-term code quality and maintainability.
• Collaborate closely with Design, Narrative, Art, Production, and QA to ensure technical solutions effectively support content creation and player experience.
• Support build stability and release readiness by working with QA, triaging issues, and driving fixes across milestones.
• Own onboarding processes, technical documentation, and knowledge sharing to ensure team efficiency and scalability.

Required Qualifications

• Extensive experience as a programmer or technical lead on shipped game titles.
• Strong proficiency in Unity and C#, including system architecture, UI systems, and tooling integration.
• Experience working on narrative-heavy or systems-driven games involving branching content, state management, and data-driven design.
• Proven ability to lead technical execution and coordinate engineers across multiple projects or pipelines.
• Experience delivering features within milestone-driven production environments.
• Strong cross-functional collaboration skills.
• Demonstrated experience establishing coding standards, review workflows, and maintainable engineering practices.
• Ability to balance hands-on development with leadership responsibilities.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience supporting live operations, post-launch updates, or DLC pipelines.
• Familiarity with localization workflows, modding ecosystems, or content-heavy tooling environments.
• Practical understanding of AI-assisted development workflows, including appropriate use cases and limitations.
• Experience evaluating and integrating AI tools responsibly within production pipelines, considering quality, security, and maintainability.
• Experience building or maintaining internal tools and content pipelines.
• Background in mid-sized or scaling studios managing multiple concurrent projects.
• Familiarity with dialogue systems, branching narrative tools, or simulation-heavy mechanics.
• Experience with performance optimization, profiling, and technical debt management.
• Exposure to web technologies, backend systems, Python, or cloud services (e.g., Node.js, Firebase).