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Senior Gameplay Engineer, Spry Fox

Spry Fox’s motto is “make the world a better place.” We try to do that through the games we make, whether that’s by designing MMOs that encourage the development of friendships and discourage toxicity, or by designing our puzzle game, Alphabear 2, to promote English language learning. We’re always asking ourselves “how does this game improve your life?”

Spry Fox is looking for a Senior Gameplay Engineer to help us build an original, non-violent MMO.

You will be responsible for building and maintaining gameplay and content systems and data-driven tooling in Unreal Engine, with a focus on the moment to moment or “game-feel” aspects of the project. You’ll work closely with the design team and rest of the engineering team to translate designs into polished player experiences and high performance client and server code.

Qualifications

• You’ve shipped a multiplayer project.
• You’ve been responsible for bringing moment to moment gameplay (e.g. controls, character, camera) to a shipping quality level.
• Recent professional experience with Unreal and a deep understanding of game engine components and architecture.
• Strong communication skills that will help you succeed in a remote team environment.
• Well-developed empathy that helps you connect with your peers across disciplines, relate to our customers, and display mature conflict resolution.
• Strong C++ programming and debugging skills.

Plusses

• Animation programming experience.
• Shipped at least one title that supported touch as well as keyboard & mouse for input.
• Experience building data-driven tooling together with a designer.
• Prior live service development experience.
• Experience with, or interest in, automated testing.

What are we offering?

• 40 hours a week: we treat crunch like the result of serious mistakes that we’ve made, not a natural and inevitable part of the development process.
• Interesting, original work as part of a small, supportive, and friendly team full of thoughtful people who care about each other and care about our impact on our players’ lives.
• Great benefits (we’re part of Netflix now – big company benefits are pretty nice!)
• The opportunity to work on a game unlike anything that has ever been made before, with, among other things, meaningful goals to improve people’s lives and reduce toxicity and loneliness in the world. We take this very seriously.

We strive to be a company that is a pleasure to work for. We hope to be an important but not dominating part of your life. We want you to have friends, family, hobbies, and a life outside of work. We want you to love your colleagues and know that they support you 100%. We want you to be proud of what you do and how you do it.

We make highly original games. Invention is part of our DNA. You’ll be working on designs that often don’t fit in a comfy genre box.

We’re fully remote, and have always (12+ years) been fully remote, which means you have the flexibility to work your 40 hours a week from where ever you like, and in whatever configuration you’d like. As long as you have an overlap with your team almost every day, let people know what you’re up to, and don’t leave the rest of us hanging, almost anything goes.

We currently have Foxes in Europe, South Africa, South America, Canada, and the USA. We have a retreat once a year to come together, bond, discuss the long-term future of projects and the company, and stay up way too late chatting around campfires. We try to be online from 10am to 2pm PST in order to ensure that we have enough overlapping work hours with each other, and otherwise, our schedules are flexible and fully under our individual control!

We have lives outside of work. Lots of us have children. Different Foxes enjoy playing music, reading books, storytelling RPGs, and traveling.

Spry Fox recognizes crunch is a negative and counter-productive practice in our industry. We consider more than a couple of weeks of crunch in a year to be a serious failure of management — something to be learned from and avoided in the future. And we have never crunched for more than six continuous weeks in the eleven year history of our studio (a blemish consigned to our distant past, hopefully forever.

Last but not least, we’re a part of Netflix now. This means that we can do what we love doing with much more support, and without having to worry about how to monetize our games at all. We’re still focused on making thoughtful, original games, more than ever really. 🙂

At Netflix, we carefully consider a wide range of compensation factors to determine your personal top of market. We rely on market indicators to determine compensation and consider your specific job, skills, and experience to get it right. These considerations can cause your compensation to vary and will also be dependent on your location.

The overall market range for roles in this area of Netflix is typically $50,000 - $250,000

This market range is based on total compensation (vs. only base salary), which is in line with our compensation philosophy. Netflix is a unique culture and environment. Learn more here.