Senior Audio Designer - Narrative Focus

HoYoverse•Los Angeles, CA

13d•$135,000 - $175,000•Onsite

About The Position

HoYoverse is seeking a Senior Audio Designer with a narrative focus to craft a coherent audio story that stitches together intermittent parts of a game to deliver a unified experience. This role involves working with gameplay, narrative, and art to define the player experience and internal processes for creating a non-linear story. The designer will partner with quest designers, technical designers, and engineers to build necessary audio functions and logic, and will also work with and guide in-house audio talent to elevate the audio experience.

Requirements

5+ years of game audio design experience
A portfolio/demo reel demonstrating systemic or non-linear audio design. Show us how your audio adapts to player choice, state changes, or emergent gameplay.
Mastery of dynamic audio implementation in a modern game engine (Unreal Engine 5 strongly preferred).
Expertise with Wwise or FMOD, especially for large-scale projects with multiple systems and complex routing.
A strong personal relationship with games. You play widely, think critically about how games work, and understand how audio shapes the player's experience from the inside.
Excellent communication skills, capable of inspiring others with a creative vision and clearly explaining technical needs to engineering partners.

Nice To Haves

Experience on shipped branching narrative games, open-world titles, immersive sims, or games where story emerges through systems.
Experience mentoring other audio designers or providing creative feedback.
Familiarity with the technical pipelines and tools used in quest or narrative scripting (e.g., visual scripting, dialogue systems).

Responsibilities

Co-create the audio vision for narrative cohesion.
Craft and implement dynamic, audio systems in Wwise and UE5 to make branching gameplay feel like an authored experienced.
Collaborate with designers across disciplines, including gameplay, systems, quest, and narrative to identify where story emerges through play.
Propose audio solutions that surface and strengthen those moments.
Help the team identify risks and keep the audio vision moving forward even when the broader design is still taking shape.
Partner with technical personnel, including tools engineers and audio programmers.
Translate the needs of systemic narrative design into clear technical requirements for our audio tools and pipelines.
Establish and document best practices for systemic audio design, creating shared language and process across the team.
Play the game relentlessly, and identify stylistic inconsistencies, dead zones, and poor transitions.
Advocate for the audio experience across disciplines.