Note: The job is a remote job and is open to candidates in USA. Pipeworks Studios is a game development company supporting AAA development partners and cross-platform game projects. The Lead Engineer will provide client-facing co-development leadership for an Unreal Engine project by coordinating distributed engineering teams, reviewing technical work, resolving ambiguity, and ensuring delivery aligns with partner expectations and standards.
Responsibilities
- Build strong working relationships with partner engineers and engineering leadership, serving as a reliable technical contact who understands their goals, communicates clearly, and follows through on commitments
- Translate partner priorities into clearly scoped tasks, coordinate estimates and assignments across external studios, and ensure teams understand requirements, dependencies, and acceptance criteria
- Keep partner and external studio teams aligned through regular communication, clear documentation, and effective handoffs across time zones
- Review technical designs, code, and in-game results, particularly in gameplay and animation, for correctness, maintainability, performance, and alignment with the partner’s expectations. Provide actionable feedback and follow through on improvements
- Lead cross-studio technical discussions, clarify requirements, resolve questions, and help teams reach decisions that fit the partner’s existing architecture and development practices
- Maintain a clear view of progress, blockers, and delivery risks. Work with the partner and production to address issues early and agree on practical adjustments to priorities or scope
- Coordinate with engineering, design, animation, art, production, and QA to ensure contributions are integrated, tested, and ready for partner review
- Share leadership responsibilities with the Pipeworks project engineering lead, maintaining enough context to independently handle partner discussions, task coordination, and technical decisions when needed
- Investigate difficult technical issues and provide hands-on support where needed to unblock teams, while keeping partner collaboration, technical oversight, and coordination as the primary focus
Skills
- Clear, direct, professional, and concise communication, including the ability to lead client-facing technical discussions, manage expectations, and explain risks and tradeoffs to technical and non-technical collaborators
- Demonstrated engineering leadership on complex game projects, including effective delegation, coordination, and accountability for team delivery
- A collaborative approach to supporting a development partner, with the ability to work within their established priorities, technical direction, codebase, and processes
- Significant hands-on Unreal Engine experience and strong C++ proficiency in large production codebases
- Strong technical judgment, debugging, and code-review skills, with broad game engineering knowledge and deep expertise in at least one area
- Ability to quickly understand an unfamiliar project, identify ambiguity and dependencies, and turn incomplete information into clear questions and actionable next steps
- Effective organization and follow-through, with the ability to keep distributed teams informed, aligned, and unblocked as priorities evolve
- Substantial professional game engineering experience, including technical leadership and coordination of complex engineering efforts
- Experience in AAA co-development or another client-facing engineering leadership role
- Experience coordinating multiple external studios or international engineering teams across time zones
- Gameplay and character animation programming experience sufficient to guide technical discussions, evaluate implementation quality, and help engineers resolve difficult problems
- Experience supporting late-production integration, bug fixing, and release stabilization
- Experience working directly with designers and animators to refine gameplay and character animation systems
- At least one shipped commercial game or another substantial production release is preferred
- A degree in computer science, engineering, or a related field is helpful but not required when equivalent professional experience is demonstrated
Benefits
- Choice of remote, in-office, or hybrid work location
- Medical, Dental, and Vision
- 401K with employer match
- Employer Paid Life Insurance Policy
- Generous Paid Time Off
- 18-20 Paid Company Holidays
- Relocation
- Paid Parental Leave
- Employee Assistance Program
- Fitness Club Discounts
- Sports Team Sponsorship
- Annual Company Events
- Project Wrap Parties
Company Overview