Principal Game Designer

Role: Principal Game Designer

Location: Remote USA (Cary, NC / NC)

Duration: 12-month contract with potential to extend or convert to full-time

Let’s create our future together at The AES Group!

About The AES Group

The AES Group is a premier technology staffing and services company that has been bringing businesses and talent together for over 20 years to deliver innovative technology solutions that create meaningful impact. AES helps enterprises, including Fortune 500 organizations, engage customers, empower employees, and transform operations through cloud, data, AI, and emerging technologies.

What You’ll Get

• Opportunity to shape high-impact engagement systems across a world-leading live-service ecosystem
• Ownership of player goals, progression, rewards, and retention mechanics at platform scale
• Highly collaborative environment working with design, product, analytics, engineering, and marketing
• Chance to rapidly prototype, ship, measure, and iterate through live design operations
• Potential path to extension and/or permanent conversion based on performance and business need

Role Overview

A leading interactive entertainment company is seeking Principal Game Designers to solve high-level engagement challenges within a major live-service multiplayer ecosystem. This role focuses on evolving existing engagement structures (such as quests, passes, and progression loops) while also inventing new systems that guide player journeys, deepen mastery, and create long-term motivation.

You will be a design leader who sets vision across cross-disciplinary teams, aligning game systems to player needs and business outcomes. The ideal candidate brings deep expertise in goal-based progression, understands how motivations vary across player types, and can translate insights into scalable systems that drive engagement, satisfaction, and healthy long-term gameplay.

Key Responsibilities

• Design and craft meaningful player goals that build exposure, experience, and mastery of both new and existing mechanics, while reinforcing world immersion
• Lead innovation for engagement features, including systems, progression, and rewards, ensuring alignment with key engagement metrics and broader systemic frameworks
• Communicate a clear, compelling player experience vision across multiple internal teams, enabling alignment and high-quality execution across disciplines
• Partner with product management, marketing, and adjacent teams to support player satisfaction, ecosystem health, and growth initiatives tied to major activations
• Drive a collaborative, iterative live design approach: prototype quickly, ship improvements rapidly, learn from data and feedback, and refine continuously
• Own decisions in fast-changing environments by setting direction, gaining alignment, and carrying the vision through implementation and iteration

Required Qualifications

• 10+ years as a game designer with experience shipping multiple titles

• Strong background designing engagement content or goal-based progression systems for live-service multiplayer games

• Demonstrated ability to empathize with players and deeply understand:

• Player motivations and play styles

• How goal setting influences engagement and behavior

• Tradeoffs across retention, satisfaction, and game health

• Proven ability to react quickly to shifting needs, drive decision-making, and own outcomes

• Strong communication skills with the ability to lead cross-team alignment and execution

Preferred Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or a related field (preferred, not required)
• Strong interest in Battle Royale and modern live-service ecosystems, with a strong understanding of what makes them thrive
• Experience collaborating with product/marketing on activation design, progression tuning, and engagement strategy
• Familiarity with data-informed live tuning (KPIs, telemetry, experimentation), while maintaining strong player-first instincts

Candidate Profile (What Success Looks Like)

You are player-focused, passionate, solutions-driven, and innovative. You can translate vision into practical systems, balance creativity with measurable outcomes, and elevate collaboration across teams to deliver engagement features that players love—and return for.

Ready to Make an Impact?

If you’ve led engagement systems at scale and thrive in fast-paced live-service environments where iteration and player insight matter daily, this is the right place to build what’s next.

Ready to make an impact? Apply now and join us on our journey!