Lead Game Engineer

OtherSide Entertainment•Concord, NH

3d•Remote

About The Position

OtherSide Entertainment is an independent game studio with fully remote staff throughout North America. Our mission is to create deeply immersive games that draw players into richly imagined worlds; games that empower players to choose their own play-style, making their experience unique and personal; games that encourage players to team up with their friends and weave their own shared narrative; the kind of games that are powered by our players’ vision as much as our own. Together, we aim to evolve the “player-authored” tradition of Ultima Underworld, System Shock, Thief, and Deus Ex – all games developed by the company’s founders, Paul Neurath and Warren Spector. This role is for a Lead Programmer to help drive the technical side of the project. You’ll work closely with our Game Director, Lead Producer, discipline leads, and engineering team to turn a big creative vision into something real, playable, stable, performant, and full of those great “wait, the game lets me do that?” moments. This is a leadership role, but not a “sit in meetings all day and wave vaguely at Jira” kind of gig. You’ll set technical direction, lead and mentor engineers, partner across disciplines, and stay hands-on in the code when needed. If you like solving hard problems, supporting creative teams, building strong technical foundations, and occasionally being the person who lovingly says, “That idea is cool, here’s what it will take,” this one might be up your alley.

Requirements

8+ years of programming experience in the games industry, including at least one commercially successful PC or console game where you served in a senior or lead programmer role.
4+ years of experience as a programming lead, with proven technical, managerial, and leadership experience.
A track record of leading strong engineering teams and solving complex technical problems across major areas of development.
Expert C++ knowledge, strong C# skills, and a proven aptitude for technical design.
Strong Unreal Engine expertise, including practical experience building, debugging, implementing, and shipping within the engine.
Experience across several key technical areas, such as core engine development, AI, networking, gameplay, and tools development.
A strong understanding of the technical pipeline and the many processes needed to actually make a game. Not just the fun parts. The weird parts too.
Strong gameplay sensibilities, including an understanding of how engineering choices affect the player experience. We are making an immersive sim, so systems, reactivity, and player agency matter a whole lot here.
Solid organization, communication, and cross-discipline collaboration skills.
Strong leadership and team management skills, including the ability to motivate, mentor, and support engineers through real production challenges.
A passion for developing and playing games, especially immersive sims or games built around player agency, reactivity, exploration, and systemic problem-solving.
A BS degree in Computer Science or equivalent experience.

Nice To Haves

Experience working on games with systemic gameplay, emergent player choice, stealth, exploration, RPG systems, simulation-driven systems, branching mission structures, or other deliciously complicated technical spaces.
Experience leading engineering teams through early development, prototyping, pre-production, major technical planning, or big scary “how are we actually going to build this?” moments.
Experience working closely with senior creative leadership and translating ambitious creative goals into practical technical plans.
Deep familiarity with immersive sims, especially games where player agency, reactivity, exploration, and problem-solving are central to the experience.
Experience improving engineering processes, technical documentation, build stability, tooling, pipelines, or other invisible-but-critical systems that make everyone’s lives better. We love a good “nice, this works now” moment.

Responsibilities

Own the game’s technical direction. You’ll own technical specs, help define architecture and implementation approaches, and keep engineering decisions aligned with where the game is actually going.
Lead, manage, and mentor the engineering team. You’ll provide clear direction, thoughtful feedback, coaching, workload management, and career support so the team can do great work without burning out.
Stay hands-on where it matters. You should be comfortable coding, reviewing, debugging, troubleshooting, and jumping into implementation when the team needs it. This is a lead role, but practical engineering experience still matters a lot.
Help ambitious ideas become shippable systems. You’ll work with design, art, production, audio, narrative, and other teams to pressure test features, identify technical needs, and make sure cool ideas can survive contact with real development.
Balance creativity with technical reality. This is an immersive sim, so there will be big ideas, weird edge cases, and plenty of “can the game support this?” moments. You’ll help the team explore what’s possible, push back when needed, and find practical paths forward.
Keep the technical signal clear. You’ll communicate technical goals, decisions, risks, priorities, and tradeoffs in a way people can actually understand. No mystery mandates, no engineering fog machine, just useful context.
Partner with production and leads on planning. You’ll help define tasks, estimate effort, build schedules, and balance prototyping, R&D, feature work, optimization, tools, and all the less-glamorous-but-vital work that helps a game ship.
Spot risks early. You’ll identify technical concerns, staffing gaps, pipeline issues, scope problems, and lurking tech debt before they become giant production headaches.
Champion technical quality and player experience. You’ll help make sure our systems, tools, performance, and implementation choices support the game we’re trying to build. The player experience is the point, even when the work is deep in the guts of the machine.