Senior Unreal Engineer - Porting AA UE5 Game to Cloud Streaming (Linux)

Amber Studio

6h•Remote

About The Position

Amber is looking for a Senior Unreal Engineer to help port a high-quality AA Unreal Engine 5 game to a Linux-based cloud streaming platform. It's a large, content-heavy, choice-driven narrative game, built on one of the most recognized entertainment franchises. The platform itself reaches a massive audience. You'll work inside a customized UE5 codebase. The work spans platform SDK integration, cloud-streamed input, performance optimization, save and profile services, automated testing, and interoperability with legacy game technology. You'll collaborate closely with engineering, technical art, UX, QA, production, platform teams, and external development partners. This is not a gameplay programmer role. It suits an engineer who's comfortable in a large, existing codebase. You should care about maintainability and careful integration as much as new features. You'll investigate unfamiliar systems, flag technical risk early, and help the team deliver a stable, responsive, visually faithful experience within tight CPU, GPU, and memory budgets. Rendering specialization isn't required. But you should be able to read profiling data, and tell code, content, configuration, and driver bottlenecks apart when working with technical artists and rendering engineers. This is a remote contract engagement, expected to run 5-7 months. Preferred working hours are 8am-5pm US Central Time.

Requirements

At least 7 years of professional game development experience, including work on large or complex productions.
At least 4 years of hands-on Unreal Engine C++ development using modern C++ (memory management, concurrency, performance-aware programming).
Strong working knowledge of Unreal Engine architecture. This includes modules and plugins, engine and gameplay subsystems, the game, render, and worker thread model, delegates and async tasks, and asset loading, streaming, and save systems.
Experience debugging and extending a large, existing codebase.
Strong Unreal Insights experience. This covers CPU timing, thread and task analysis, memory, and load-time profiling and optimization.
Experience integrating third-party or platform SDKs into Unreal Engine.
Experience writing clear, maintainable, testable production code, isolated behind interfaces.
Experience with Perforce or a similar version control system built for large, binary-heavy game repositories.
Comfortable explaining technical trade-offs to non-technical stakeholders, in English, spoken and written.

Nice To Haves

Professional experience debugging or supporting Unreal Engine builds on Linux.
Working knowledge of Linux development and diagnostics: toolchains, shared libraries, environment configuration, core dumps, and command-line debugging.
Shipped at least one AAA or high-quality AA PC or console title.
Experience with Unreal Engine 5.5 or later.
Experience with CI/CD for Unreal Engine: automated cooking, packaging, deployment, and validation.
Experience with Epic's low-level memory tracker, RenderDoc, or comparable GPU profiling tools.
Knowledge of IPC, sockets, shared memory, and message-based communication.
Familiarity with achievements, cloud profiles, analytics, compliance, and certification workflows.
Experience with HTML/JavaScript controller interfaces or WebView/WebApp integrations.

Responsibilities

Adapt and stabilize the game for Linux.
Bring up and diagnose new builds on a cloud streaming runtime as the platform matures.
Integrate platform SDK functionality. This includes input, controller connectivity, user profiles, saves, achievements, telemetry, and lifecycle events, wired in behind clean interfaces to the existing gameplay, narrative, UI, and save systems.
Build cloud-streamed controller input end to end. Handle connection, disconnection, reconnection, error recovery, and latency across the controller-to-encoder pipeline.
Profile and optimize performance. Cover CPU, GPU, memory, loading, and frame-time behavior, partnering with technical artists on Lumen, Nanite, Virtual Shadow Maps, ray tracing, and platform scalability.
Support cloud-native save, profile, progression, and session-resume workflows.
Diagnose threading, synchronization, IPC, and frame-pacing issues. These can show up anywhere across the customized engine, plugins, and legacy runtime integrations.
Track down long-session stability issues. Look for memory growth, leaks, hitches, and allocation spikes. Also improve startup time, shader and pipeline-cache behavior, and level transitions.
Build out automated testing and diagnostic tooling. Use and extend the Unreal Automation Framework and Gauntlet. Add smoke, performance, and regression coverage for a large, content-heavy game.
Flag technical risk early. Investigate unfamiliar systems and communicate trade-offs clearly to engineering and non-engineering stakeholders across internal teams, platform engineers, and external partners.