Lead Technical Level Designer

Nekki is hiring a Lead Technical Level Designer for the UE5 game SPINE. Lead a team, develop tools, and ensure technical quality. Remote contract role, salary negotiable.

Nekki is a game development studio with over 20 years of experience. We create games for mobile, PC, and consoles, focusing on product quality and player experience. The Shadow Fight series and Vector have been downloaded over 1 billion times, and we continue to grow and support these franchises. At the same time, we’re building new titles: SPINE and Fight Me. SPINE is made with Unreal Engine 5 and centered around cinematic gun-fu shootouts. It’s a third-person beat’em’up with a full set of PC gaming features, including a deep storyline, a unique setting, cutscenes, intriguing enemies, memorable bosses, character progression, and, most importantly, breathtaking battles with a wide array of firearms. Responsibilities: Lead a team of technical level designers: plan workload, assign tasks, and evaluate the quality of their work; Help people grow through regular one-to-ones and feedback, development plans, and mentorship within the team; Build a smooth pipeline with other departments: with level artists, level designers, and narrative designers at every stage of level production, and with programmers on tool development; Identify the root causes of recurring production problems and initiate the development of missing tools; Translate designers' needs into technical requirements and work with programmers to bring them to a solution; Keep documentation up to date and help the team learn the tools; Oversee the technical quality of levels: collisions, streaming, event script setup, and so on.

3+ years of experience in game level production, including hands-on experience with the technical side; Experience leading a team of 3 or more people, or mentoring experience; Experience independently implementing mechanics and systems for levels in Blueprints or C++ (experience in other programming languages is acceptable); Experience working with UE5 level production tools: Level Streaming and World Partition (Data Layers, HLOD, One File Per Actor), Level Instances, Packed Level Actors, and so on; Understanding of level design fundamentals; Fluent communication in Russian is required. Nice to Have: A shipped PC or console project; Experience developing editor tools: Editor Utility Widgets, Python in UE, C++; Experience profiling and optimizing levels for consoles; Experience working on third-person action games.

Contract Remote. Salary negotiable.