Designer, Life Skills

Level • Austin, TX

3d

About The Position

Level is a learning technology company that combines research-grounded curriculum principles with interactive design to help students build academic and life skills. The Designer will create game-led, narrative-driven experiences that teach life skills, taking high-level learning concepts and shaping the game loop, story, characters, and mechanics from initial designs through prototypes and shipped modules. The role balances pedagogical rigor with student engagement and uses AI as the primary prototyping tool. It is a hands-on role on a fast-moving team that is building its offering from scratch and values early pitching, rough prototypes, rapid feedback, and iteration.

Requirements

• Experience in narrative design, game design, or interactive storytelling, professionally, independently, or both, including writing scripts or dialogue.
• Strong product and creative judgment, including an understanding of what makes experiences compelling to children.
• Ability to integrate learning goals, stories, and mechanics into a cohesive design, using constraints to support rather than detract from enjoyment.
• Track record of rapid prototyping with frontier AI models, shaping existing tools and content toward specific experiences and turning repeated work into repeatable workflows; practical fluency is required, not engineering expertise.
• Experience designing with partners from other disciplines while exercising independent creative judgment.
• Ability to carry a design from pitch through a shipped module while maintaining a high quality bar at startup pace.
• Enthusiasm for change and willingness to treat evolving formats and methods as new design problems.

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 alongside art, animation, or audio teams.
• A portfolio or work samples demonstrating game design, interactive content, animation, learning design, or AI-assisted production work; applicants should include a link.

Responsibilities

• Partner with learning designers to turn pedagogical briefs into engaging game loops, stories, characters, and mechanics that teach students effectively.
• Use AI as the primary prototyping medium to create playable versions quickly, gather feedback from learning designers, the team, and children, and iterate designs for technical design refinement.
• Write scripts and define mechanics, systems, and interaction design, ensuring implementation remains true to the design through to a shipped module.
• Identify early when design concepts are impractical to implement.
• Maintain creative coherence across modules, ensuring mechanics, story, world, and implementation align with the design intent.
• Brief art and audio contributors on the needs of each experience and assess when AI-generated assets are sufficient versus when bespoke work is needed.
• Drive implementation of playtest and classroom findings by making changes where possible and escalating decisions that require design or cross-team input.
• Experiment proactively with AI workflows and stay current on frontier model capabilities.
• Extend craft and tooling developed through module work to new projects, formats, and experiments.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Education Level: No Education Listed