Designer, Life Skills

Level•Austin, TX

About The Position

Level is a learning technology company that creates research-grounded, interactive experiences to help students build academic and life skills. The Designer, Life Skills creates game-led, narrative-driven experiences that teach life skills. Working from learning designers’ pedagogical briefs, the designer develops the game loop, story, characters, and mechanics, balancing pedagogical rigor with student engagement. This is a hands-on role split between designing and building. The designer uses AI as a primary prototyping tool to quickly create playable experiences, test them with the team and children, and iterate toward a shipped module. The role owns the experience from initial pitch through implementation, maintaining creative coherence and ensuring that the final build reflects the design intent. The designer also collaborates with learning designers and art and audio partners, applies playtest and classroom findings, and experiments with evolving AI workflows and formats.

Requirements

Experience in narrative design, game design, or interactive storytelling, gained professionally, independently, or both.
Experience writing scripts or dialogue.
Strong product and creative judgment, including an understanding of what makes experiences compelling to children.
Ability to integrate a learning goal, story, and mechanic into one design, using constraints as a source of fun rather than a burden.
Track record of rapid prototyping with frontier AI models and shaping existing tools and content toward a specific experience.
Ability to turn repeated work into repeatable workflows; practical AI fluency is required, not engineering expertise.
Experience designing in partnership with people from other disciplines while exercising independent creative judgment.
Ability to take a design from pitch through a shipped module while maintaining a high quality bar at startup pace.
Enthusiasm for rapidly changing formats and methods, and an ability to treat change as a new design problem.

Nice To Haves

Experience making games, shows, or content for children.
Background in human development, learning science, social-emotional learning, or life skills.
Experience with playtesting or user research.
Animation or motion design experience.
Experience working with art, animation, or audio teams.
Portfolio or work samples demonstrating game design, interactive content, animation, learning design, or AI-assisted production work; applicants are asked to include a link.

Responsibilities

Design lessons in partnership with learning designers, turning pedagogical briefs into engaging game loops, stories, characters, and mechanics.
Use AI as a primary medium to create playable prototypes quickly, put them in front of the learning designer, team, and children, and iterate toward technical design.
Write scripts and define mechanics, systems, and interaction design.
Carry the design through implementation to a shipped module, keeping implementation true to the original intent.
Identify early when proposed designs will not work in practice.
Maintain creative coherence across a module, including consistency among mechanics, story, world, and implementation.
Brief art and audio partners on the needs of each experience element, and determine when AI-generated assets are sufficient versus when handmade work is needed.
Drive implementation of playtest and classroom findings by making changes directly where possible and escalating decisions that require design or cross-team input.
Experiment proactively with new AI workflows and stay current on frontier model capabilities.
Extend craft and tooling developed through module work to new projects, formats, and experiments.