Systems Engineer (Senior/Principal/Lead)

Are you naturally curious and a tinkerer at heart? Do you enjoy pushing the capabilities of technology? If those sound like you, keep reading - because Bonfire’s engineering team is growing!

Bonfire is looking for a Senior/Principal/Lead Systems Engineer to help build systems & tools specifically around optimizations & netcode to empower our team on our first game. Bonfire Studios is a highly collaborative, cross-disciplinary environment where every developer’s voice shapes the company, the game, and the tasks we work on each day. As an Engineer on our team, you will have the opportunity to shape the technology that powers our first title and create an amazing experience for our players.

About the roles...

• Your main focus will be working on the engine and foundational systems that our game technology and tools are built in Unity using DOTS via C# and C/C++. The projects you work on will mostly be focused around making the foundational systems at the engine level underneath the game and tools function more efficiently and smoothly for the team and for players.
• In a Lead/Principal role, you will have an opportunity to collaborate more closely with other leads (both internal and external to the studio) to advance the engine.
• Projects may include things like optimizing the pipeline to allow a developer to iterate on a feature in milliseconds instead of seconds, building the foundation that other engineers use to create maintainable, easy-to-use, live-editable profiling systems, and optimizing runtime systems such as rendering, streaming, and netcode.
• We love people who are passionate about multiple areas so you will probably also spend time in other areas; you might help with audio, gameplay systems, audio tools, UI systems, platforms.
• Your ultimate impact on the studio will be unbounded; we lean on each other's passions and embrace one another's unique perspectives on game development to help us all grow as a team together. You will have many opportunities to contribute to areas of the game and the company outside your core focus.

We're excited about you because you...

• Believe, as we do, that great games are the product of great teams that put their people first.
• Have experience working on custom/heavily modified engines for AAA games across PC and modern consoles with multiple shipped titles.
• Have been a part of building technologies that allow developers to efficiently deliver live service content to players.
• Deeply understand multi-threaded architecture and asynchronous programming paradigms.
• Find it fun to debug and discover root causes for hard to reproduce issues like memory corruption.
• Have experience with ECS paradigms in game engines, and/or are excited about digging deeply into ECS paradigms in game engines.
• Are open, humble, eager, and excited about learning and contributing in multiple areas of the studio. Your curiosity propels you to jump in and dive deep on new problems.
• Enjoy working on projects that make the entire engineering team more efficient. You are able to put yourself in the shoes of a user and make beautiful, easy-to-use APIs.
• Are comfortable writing a memory allocator on Monday, a tool that automates a laborious process on Tuesday, helping out the gameplay engineers with the new Quest system on Wednesday, tracking down a difficult bug in the A* algorithm on Thursday, and doing some low-level optimizations on Friday.
• Want to have a large impact while collaborating with other talented developers in a tight knit AAA studio, rolling up your sleeves and using your passions and interests to shape your role at the company.
• Enjoy jumping deep into an area that you aren't familiar with and figure it out. Value the skill of understanding unfamiliar code.
• Value building trust with the people you work with. Collaborating is your preferred method of working with other engineers and developers.
• Value working with a diverse team and welcome different perspectives.
• Have a growth mindset and also care about helping others develop.
• Are as passionate about the creative process and developing games as we are!

You'll love working at Bonfire because we...

• Have strong values that include transparency, ownership, and trust. We are a people-first studio that also strives for a high bar of excellence in our creations.
• Celebrate craft expertise because we are a small, tight-knit group of highly experienced game developers who are as passionate about our team as we are our game.
• Offer opportunities to learn and contribute beyond your focused discipline in areas of interest or passion.
• Practice candor and feedback, leveling ourselves and each other up in the process.
• Play games and have fun together, kindling our own love for games and learning about each other.

The base salary range for this position is $190,137 - $333,000. The range doesn't tell the whole story - we are always open to candidates at different stages in their careers and consider candidates' potential impact holistically, not just their years of experience or skill level. There is also more to our total comp package than salary, we offer equity to every new hire as well as a comprehensive benefits package and more. We will be happy to share more about our compensation opportunities when we chat with you!