About the position
At Blizzard, we craft genre-defining games and legendary worlds for all to share. Through unparalleled creativity and storytelling, we create immersive universes and iconic characters that are beloved across platforms, borders, backgrounds, and generations - only made possible by building a work environment that nurtures the artistry of game development and unleashes the aspirations of our people. As a Senior Gameplay Tools Engineer, you will work within game code, Unreal Engine, and Unreal Editor to improve our workflows, enable design-driven feature development, and develop data-driven systems and pipeline. You will support the development of code frameworks, functional components, workflows, and content creation tools, as well as collaborate in driving improvements in the underlying engine technology. You will work collaboratively with the team to define and execute a technical vision that meets the project's needs. This role is anticipated to be a full-time, hybrid work position, with some work on-site and some work-from-home. The home studio for this role is Irvine, CA.
Responsibilities
- Improve the efficiency and capability of our designer and engineer workflows that directly relate to player-facing gameplay and systems.
- Empower designers, artists, and other engineers to deliver the vision of the game and ensure we delight and entertain our players.
- Collaborate with designers and engineers on gameplay teams to learn and understand their needs and offer technical solutions.
- Optimize team productivity by supporting content-creation pipelines, tool development, and workflow improvements.
Requirements
- 5+ years of experience in gameplay engineering or a combination of applicable training and experience.
- Experience delivering AAA-quality features and experiences as part of a cross-functional team including designers, artists, animators, level designers, FX artists, etc.
- Experience developing new or modifying existing tools, workflows and pipelines used for asset and world-content creation.
- Experience working on real-time 3D games and their supporting editor and tool infrastructure.
- The ability to understand and write production-grade C++ code.
- The capacity to make frequent, readable, well-tested code commits.
- The ability to communicate and articulate vision, ideas, learnings from others, and to give meaningful feedback.
- Excellent problem-solving and debugging skills.
- Experience analyzing game features and content for performance and optimizing a game to release quality.
- Experience working closely in multi-disciplinary teams with people of diverse mindsets.
- Mentorship mindset and excellent attitude to helping others level up their knowledge.
Nice-to-haves
- Experience developing using the Unreal engine (both C++ and Blueprint)
- Experience creating custom tools and extending existing Unreal Editor UX to fit game production needs.
- Computer science, mathematics, physics, or related degree.
- Experience developing and shipping AAA game titles for PC, Xbox, and/or PlayStation consoles.
- Experience with large codebases.
- Experience working on online multiplayer games.
- Familiarity with imGui or similar editor-interface SDKs.
Benefits
- Medical, dental, vision, health savings account or health reimbursement account, healthcare spending accounts, dependent care spending accounts, life and AD&D insurance, disability insurance.
- 401(k) with Company match, tuition reimbursement, charitable donation matching.
- Paid holidays and vacation, paid sick time, floating holidays, compassion and bereavement leaves, parental leave.
- Mental health & wellbeing programs, fitness programs, free and discounted games, and a variety of other voluntary benefit programs like supplemental life & disability, legal service, ID protection, rental insurance, and others.
- Relocation assistance if required to move geographic locations for the job.
