Lead Game Engineer

Who We Are

OtherSide Entertainment is an independent game studio with fully remote staff throughout North America. Our mission is to create deeply immersive games that draw players into richly imagined worlds; games that empower players to choose their own play-style, making their experience unique and personal; games that encourage players to team up with their friends and weave their own shared narrative; the kind of games that are powered by our players’ vision as much as our own. Together, we aim to evolve the “player-authored” tradition of Ultima Underworld, System Shock, Thief, and Deus Ex – all games developed by the company’s founders, Paul Neurath and Warren Spector.

The Opportunity

Want to help build the next great immersive sim?

OtherSide Entertainment is continuing development on a next-generation immersive sim from Warren Spector, focused on non-lethal exploration, meaningful choices, and giving players the ability to shape the world around them in significant ways.

We’re looking for a talented Lead Programmer to help drive the technical side of the project. You’ll work closely with our Game Director, Lead Producer, discipline leads, and engineering team to turn a big creative vision into something real, playable, stable, performant, and full of those great “wait, the game lets me do that?” moments.

This is a leadership role, but not a “sit in meetings all day and wave vaguely at Jira” kind of gig. You’ll set technical direction, lead and mentor engineers, partner across disciplines, and stay hands-on in the code when needed.

If you like solving hard problems, supporting creative teams, building strong technical foundations, and occasionally being the person who lovingly says, “That idea is cool, here’s what it will take,” this one might be up your alley.

What You’ll Do

Working closely with our Game Director, Project Director, Lead Producer, and other discipline leads, you’ll lead the engineering team across a variety of technical areas. You’ll help define the game’s technical direction, guide the team through production realities, and make sure the engineering work supports the player experience we’re trying to build.

This is a leadership-forward role, but not a hands-off one. You’ll help the team understand the technical shape of big ideas, negotiate tradeoffs, identify risks, and turn creative ambition into practical engineering plans. You’ll also need to explain technical realities clearly without making everyone feel like the fun police just arrived.

As Lead Programmer, the big pieces are:

• Own the game’s technical direction. You’ll own technical specs, help define architecture and implementation approaches, and keep engineering decisions aligned with where the game is actually going.
• Lead, manage, and mentor the engineering team. You’ll provide clear direction, thoughtful feedback, coaching, workload management, and career support so the team can do great work without burning out.
• Stay hands-on where it matters. You should be comfortable coding, reviewing, debugging, troubleshooting, and jumping into implementation when the team needs it. This is a lead role, but practical engineering experience still matters a lot.
• Help ambitious ideas become shippable systems. You’ll work with design, art, production, audio, narrative, and other teams to pressure test features, identify technical needs, and make sure cool ideas can survive contact with real development.
• Balance creativity with technical reality. This is an immersive sim, so there will be big ideas, weird edge cases, and plenty of “can the game support this?” moments. You’ll help the team explore what’s possible, push back when needed, and find practical paths forward.
• Keep the technical signal clear. You’ll communicate technical goals, decisions, risks, priorities, and tradeoffs in a way people can actually understand. No mystery mandates, no engineering fog machine, just useful context.
• Partner with production and leads on planning. You’ll help define tasks, estimate effort, build schedules, and balance prototyping, R&D, feature work, optimization, tools, and all the less-glamorous-but-vital work that helps a game ship.
• Spot risks early. You’ll identify technical concerns, staffing gaps, pipeline issues, scope problems, and lurking tech debt before they become giant production headaches.
• Champion technical quality and player experience. You’ll help make sure our systems, tools, performance, and implementation choices support the game we’re trying to build. The player experience is the point, even when the work is deep in the guts of the machine.

What We’re Looking For

We’re looking for someone with deep game engineering experience, strong leadership skills, and the ability to guide a team through the messy, creative, highly technical work of building an ambitious PC and console game.

You should be comfortable managing people, supporting career growth, giving clear feedback, making decisions when signals are muddy, and collaborating across disciplines. You’ll need strong communication, calm problem-solving, and a healthy respect for the fact that game development is weird, complicated, and much better when people trust each other.

You should have:

• 8+ years of programming experience in the games industry, including at least one commercially successful PC or console game where you served in a senior or lead programmer role.
• 4+ years of experience as a programming lead, with proven technical, managerial, and leadership experience.
• A track record of leading strong engineering teams and solving complex technical problems across major areas of development.
• Expert C++ knowledge, strong C# skills, and a proven aptitude for technical design.
• Strong Unreal Engine expertise, including practical experience building, debugging, implementing, and shipping within the engine.
• Experience across several key technical areas, such as core engine development, AI, networking, gameplay, and tools development.
• A strong understanding of the technical pipeline and the many processes needed to actually make a game. Not just the fun parts. The weird parts too.
• Strong gameplay sensibilities, including an understanding of how engineering choices affect the player experience. We are making an immersive sim, so systems, reactivity, and player agency matter a whole lot here.
• Solid organization, communication, and cross-discipline collaboration skills.
• Strong leadership and team management skills, including the ability to motivate, mentor, and support engineers through real production challenges.
• A passion for developing and playing games, especially immersive sims or games built around player agency, reactivity, exploration, and systemic problem-solving.
• A BS degree in Computer Science or equivalent experience.

Bonus Points

Not required, but definitely nice to have:

• Experience working on games with systemic gameplay, emergent player choice, stealth, exploration, RPG systems, simulation-driven systems, branching mission structures, or other deliciously complicated technical spaces.
• Experience leading engineering teams through early development, prototyping, pre-production, major technical planning, or big scary “how are we actually going to build this?” moments.
• Experience working closely with senior creative leadership and translating ambitious creative goals into practical technical plans.
• Deep familiarity with immersive sims, especially games where player agency, reactivity, exploration, and problem-solving are central to the experience.
• Experience improving engineering processes, technical documentation, build stability, tooling, pipelines, or other invisible-but-critical systems that make everyone’s lives better. We love a good “nice, this works now” moment.

A Little More About The Role

You’ll be joining a project with a big creative swing, a genre-defining creative leader, and a team working to make something ambitious. That means we need someone who can bring structure without smothering creativity, technical clarity without ego, and leadership without needing to be the loudest person in the room.

This is a big leadership role, but it is still a very practical engineering role. You’ll help set the technical direction, support and grow the engineering team, partner closely with other disciplines, and make sure technical decisions serve the project, the team, and the player experience.

If you like building great teams, solving hard technical problems, and helping make games where players can do wonderfully unexpected things, we’d love to hear from you.

And if you give a cover letter, know that I read every one with every application, so please don’t AI-generate one. We make things with love here, and if you love immersive sims, you’ll write one with love as well. Cover letters are not a requirement.

The Standard Stuff

This is a full-time, remote working role, with competitive compensation and a full suite of benefits available anywhere in the United States. All team members may be asked to occasionally travel for key meetings, as part of their job responsibilities.

At OtherSide Entertainment, we know our success depends on our people. Just as our mission is oriented around empowering our players, we open our doors to all kinds of candidates. Our development process and players benefit from a variety of points of view, united by a shared passion for making fun and engaging experiences. If you don’t hit every one of our bullets, unless otherwise noted, feel free to still submit an application if you too resonate with our mission. If you require any accommodations to ensure an equitable interviewing experience please let us know!

A Warning About Job Scams - We hate that we have to say it, but there are always bad actors trying to take advantage of people. We've become aware that there are scammers impersonating us with job interview messages. Please keep diligent and know that we will never have you download anything for an interview (We use Teamtailor, which is a SaaS product) and not Telegram or other message services. We also will not ever ask you for money, for you to buy your own equipment, or that you travel somewhere for an interview and we will reimburse you. When in doubt, please feel free to message the recruiter listed for each role on LinkedIn, or our CPO Juliette (https://www.linkedin.com/in/juliettedupre/) about the legitimacy of any messages.