Staff Game Play Engineer, Battle Road

About the Role

As a Staff Gameplay Engineer, you'll be a senior technical leader on the AtomEngine team — setting the architectural direction for gameplay systems, providing cross-team technical guidance, and directly improving the quality and velocity of everything we ship. This is a high-impact individual contributor role with broad organizational influence.

What You'll Do

• Own and drive gameplay systems architecture across AtomEngine, providing technical direction on complex, cross-cutting problems
• Provide architectural input across multiple concurrent projects — raise the quality ceiling and hit rate on feature delivery
• Collaborate closely with designers and PMs to shape features from concept through delivery, ensuring technical feasibility, performance, and schedule alignment
• Implement and optimize gameplay systems using Godot, GDScript, and C++
• Design with a deep understanding of client/server architecture, state replication, latency, and scale
• Partner with QA and testing teams to validate features, identify edge cases, and drive quality outcomes
• Mentor mid and junior engineers — invest in the team's growth, not just your own output
• Write and maintain clear technical documentation to support long-term maintainability and cross-team collaboration
• Balance delivery, quality, and long-term maintainability through sound technical judgment and pragmatic tradeoffs.

What We Look For

• 9+ years of game engine or gameplay engineering experience, with demonstrated Staff or equivalent scope
• Deep familiarity with and experience tailoring game engines — Godot, Unity, Unreal, or custom
• Sees and cultivates emergent behaviors across multiple interacting systems
• Experience shipping and supporting live service games at scale
• Proven ability to architect complex gameplay systems and communicate technical decisions to cross-functional stakeholders
• Track record of raising engineering quality and velocity across a team, not just within your own work
• Demonstrated technical judgment in balancing feature delivery, system quality, technical debt, and long-term investment
• Ability to create clarity and drive execution in ambiguous problem spaces
• History of simplifying systems, reducing complexity, and improving maintainability
• Low ego — you're here to make the product and the team better
• U.S. Citizenship required due to federal contract requirements

Nice to Haves

• Experience with military simulation, constructive modeling, or defense software
• Familiarity with entity component systems or simulation-at-scale architecture
• Experience working on real-time-strategy (RTS) games
• Experience working alongside government customers

Notice to Third Party Recruitment Agencies

Please note that Onebrief does not accept unsolicited resumes from recruiters or employment agencies. In the absence of an executed Recruitment Services Agreement, there will be no obligation to any referral compensation or recruiter fee. In the event a recruiter or agency submits a resume or candidate without an agreement Onebrief explicitly reserves the right to pursue and hire those candidate(s) without any financial obligation to the recruiter or agency. Any unsolicited resumes, including those submitted to hiring managers, shall be deemed the property of Onebrief.