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Live Ops Technical Designer (Apex Legends)

Our Apex Legends team is looking for an experienced Technical Designer for Live Ops who will help create a balanced, fun and rock-solid environment for players of all types. We’re imagining someone who is creative, technical and deeply in touch with the needs of our community. We are looking for designers who live and breathe systems, who are able to put in place rock-solid foundations for our players to delight in, foresee potential problems and take decisive actions to nip them in the bud before players ever encounter them.

What’s it like to be a Technical Designer at Respawn?

Day to Day -

Our Live Ops Designers’ tasks include interacting with our player base, solving problems, diagnosing the root cause of tricky issues our players experience, and implementing solutions. Your investigative skills will be put to the test. Some specific opportunities in this role include a focus on direct communication with players, advocating for changes and fixes on their behalf, and improving our infrastructure and tools to keep Apex Legends healthy and stable 24/7 .

Creative Freedom -

We believe that when developers have creative freedom and work together they will make extraordinary games that achieve the unexpected. Our designers are encouraged to share ideas, iterate for greatness, scope wisely, and deliver polished designs they are proud of for players to enjoy. As a Live Ops Designer your efforts will have a direct hand in shaping a game played by millions, and your voice will matter when it comes to making Apex Legends the best game possible.

Ownership -

Our teams are small and everyone has a lot of ownership over their work. Our Live Ops Designers own their individual features from conceptualization to shipping. As part of a small team you will have the opportunity to shine here.

Feel -

Our studio puts a big emphasis on fun gameplay. We want responsive, immersive gameplay that just feels right. Every detail matters - whether it’s the way a player experiences traversing across a cliffside, the way a weapon feels amazing to use, how systems come together to encourage total strangers to work in harmony towards a unified goal, to the way players can feel accomplished and proud of their in-game achievements; it’s all crafted with purpose. All disciplines in game development are accountable to the gameplay a player experiences - and our designers are key in ensuring the best feel possible.

Collaboration -

Our Live Ops design team plays a central role in development. You will collaborate with other designers and disciplines such as code, vfx, and art. The work of our Live Ops designers has an impact on others, and they anticipate and communicate any design changes or scoping efforts that may affect schedules and workloads.

Values -

Our designers are aligned on their values. They share their inspiration, knowledge, and passion with the others in their department. They aspire to treat everything they work on as a personal masterpiece. They play the game and are encouraged to speak up if they see anything that is not up to our standards. They play other studios’ games and stay up to date with trends, while also striving to invent something new. They put their time and passion into what will have the biggest payoff for players. Our leads also make a lot of effort to ensure that our designers work on aspects they are excited about.

What do we look for in Technical Designer for Live Ops candidates?

Empathy for the Players -

Our Live Ops Designers seek to nurture and develop the relationship between our players and the dev team. We'd like to see examples where you took the initiative to improve the experience for players on a shipped game - how you found out what problems they faced, decided on what features would best make their lives better, and helped drive those features directly to players' hands.

Strong Problem Solving Skills -

A shipped game with millions of daily players presents challenges of immense sizes. We'd love for you to share stories of how you were able to diagnose tricky bugs and issues from incomplete data, the steps you took to solve the problems with the limited resources you had on hand, and the systems you put in place to make sure that the same problem would never trouble players again.

Design Sensibilities and Insight -

Our designers value having discussions with each other to better understand the intentions and level of success in their designs. We’d love for you to share why you made the decisions you’ve made in your own designs - what worked well, what you would change in hindsight, and what you learned. We also value your ability to analyze and break down, from a designer’s perspective, the aspects that work well or don’t work well in games you’ve played and why.

You’ve Made Stuff You Are Proud Of -

Whether it’s professional or personal work, we’d like to see examples in your portfolio that you developed from concept to finish. We like to see portfolios that showcase strong game design skills - robustness, elegance, creative usage of constraints, technical skills, documents, etc. If your portfolio includes work that you developed as part of a team, we’d like to know the specifics of what you contributed versus what was handled by others.

Passion -

We look for game designers who are highly passionate. Our team is constantly sharing inspiration and working to raise the quality bar. No one is phoning it in here – our team loves what they do and it shows in their work.

Potential Over Experience –

We value talent over years of experience. Experience counts, but potential is important too. We look for motivated people with a strong sense of design and quality.

Teamplayer –

The ability to accept feedback and critiques will help you tailor your work towards what’s best for the game. We look for designers who demonstrate openness to team members’ ideas, incorporating suggestions to tailor your work towards what’s best for the game. Making games is a group effort and you will work closely with other accomplished departments that are experts in what they do. Teamwork is very important to our success.

Ideally, you also will have...

5+ years professional experience as a designer for games, ideally as a scripter and/or systems designer.

Fluency in one or more scripting or programming languages.

Experience in communicating to players in an official capacity.

Strong problem solving skills.

A cool head and the ability to work under time pressure and limited resources.

Deep player expertise in one or more game genres.

If this opportunity sounds like a great fit for you, please submit your resume and portfolio and we will get back to you once you have been reviewed.