Lead Game Designer

About This Role

Leading a team of designers across multiple areas, the Lead Game Designer will work closely with the Game Director, Lead Producer, and other discipline leads. This role requires a leader who can challenge ideas, connect different perspectives, and combine them into a cohesive vision for the next generation of immersive simulations. It is a unique opportunity to play a key role in building and launching a major new PC and console game, pushing the immersive sim genre forward.

Responsibilities

• Own the Game Design Document (GDD) and roadmap, keeping both accurate, organized, current, and helpful for the team
• Manage design ownership, align documentation and roadmap planning with the game's direction, and balance prototyping, R&D, feature/content development, and optimization
• Prepare milestone materials like presentations, overviews, videos, and summaries that clearly communicate the project's story
• Be resilient and comfortable pushing back when necessary, while remaining flexible and open to new ideas
• Keep the design signal clear by communicating design goals, decisions, and tradeoffs across all levels, ensuring alignment with the established vision
• Lead and support a team of experienced designers through mentoring, coaching, career development, and workload management
• Champion design quality through honest, collaborative, candid, critical, useful, and kind feedback
• Identify design needs, staffing gaps, process issues, and potential risks before they escalate
• Work with other disciplines to validate designs, pressure test ideas, and ensure they are viable once art, engineering, production, audio, and narrative teams are involved
• Jump into prototypes and testing when needed to prove out design concepts, tune and balance features, and learn from the work
• Represent the game internally and externally, championing the project, the design team, and player experience

Requirements

• Lead Designer and people manager experience within the past 5 years on a successfully released and well-regarded PC or console game, expansion, content pack, or live title release
• Experience managing multiple direct reports, design processes, and design information repositories
• Comfortable managing people, supporting career growth, giving clear feedback, making decisions when signals are unclear, and collaborating across disciplines
• 6+ years total game design experience, with at least two shipped titles and a team management role
• Strong sense of what makes gameplay great, how to build toward a high-quality bar, and how to help a team achieve it collaboratively
• High energy, strong communication, and respect for the messy, creative, and weird nature of game development
• Comfortable working with challenging ideas and knowing the difference between a musing and a directive