Gameplay Systems Software Engineer
About The Position
Founded in 2023, 2K Sports Lab is the newest stand alone studio at 2K looking to push game development boundaries to bring 2K's next groundbreaking sports franchise to life. We're building a world-class team at our new Vancouver, BC location where our goal is to deliver an exceptional experience through bold ideas, technical excellence, and creative collaboration. We're seeking passionate and driven professionals across all areas of game development to help shape this ambitious vision. If you’re interested in tackling unique challenges and think you have what it takes to level up our team, we encourage you to apply! We are seeking a passionate C++ Gameplay Systems Software Engineer to help build the runtime systems that drive crowds, pedestrians, background NPCs, and other non-player actors at scale. This is an important role responsible for contributing to the foundational systems that bring dense, believable, and performant worlds to life. The ideal candidate has strong modern C++ fundamentals, hands-on Unreal Engine (UE5) experience, and an interest in building performant real-time simulation systems. Experience with crowd systems, NPC behavior, animation runtime systems, or large-scale actor optimization is highly valuable. You do not need to have worked on every system listed below. We are looking for engineers with strong C++ fundamentals, production Unreal experience, and the ability to reason about performance-sensitive runtime systems.
Requirements
- 3+ years of professional game development or relevant real-time simulation experience.
- Strong modern C++ skills, including memory, performance, debugging, and data-oriented design fundamentals.
- Production experience with Unreal Engine 4 or 5.
- Experience building gameplay, AI, animation, character, or simulation systems.
- Comfortable profiling and optimizing runtime systems under CPU, memory, and frame-time constraints.
- Strong communication skills and ability to collaborate across engineering, design, animation, and art.
Nice To Haves
- Experience with UE5 MassEntity, StateTree, ZoneGraph, Smart Objects, or similar ECS/agent-behavior systems.
- Experience with large crowds, NPC populations, pedestrian systems, or background-life simulation.
- Familiarity with procedural generation or machine-learning-assisted approaches for agent behavior, population, or animation selection.
- Previous experience shipping a AAA title developed on Unreal Engine.
Responsibilities
- Design and implement C++ runtime systems for large-scale crowd, NPC, and pedestrian simulation.
- Collaborate with AI, Animation and design to translate behavior goals into maintainable, performant gameplay systems.
- Build scalable LOD, significance, visibility, and culling systems for thousands of active or semi-active agents.
- Profile CPU, memory, and animation costs using Unreal Insights and platform tools.
- Contribute to our character pipeline and runtime
Benefits
- bonus and/or equity awards
- full range of medical, financial, and/or other benefits
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Mid Level
Education Level
No Education Listed
