Senior Generalist Engine Programmer

Where it is: San Francisco, CA. (relocation assistance is available)

Where you’ll work: Hybrid - In our San Francisco office two (2) days a week

Who it reports to: Tech Director

Double Fine strives to be an inclusive company. We believe that a diverse team leads to the best games.

Overview

We’re looking for a full-time Senior Generalist Engine Programmer to join our studio. We are expanding our Central Development programming team to support our current and future titles. If your dream is to be like a little Hexipal working to maintain our spaceship then this is the role for you!

At Double Fine you will be collaborating with artists, animators, your fellow programmers, and other disciplines on a regular basis. People here encourage a “yes, and…” approach to game development in order to cultivate imaginative ideas. Apply if you want to work with a highly creative, innovative, small, and sometimes silly development team!

About the Role

As the Senior Generalist Engine Programmer, your primary responsibility is to support our game project teams in optimizing, debugging, and architecting efficient and maintainable systems level code. You will need to be highly collaborative and communicative with the programmers and other team members on the game project teams to identify and address critical technical bottlenecks in game performance and stability.

You will be responsible for developing and maintaining a wide range of game-focused systems and internal development tools on PC and Xbox platforms. You are the ideal candidate if you have  a broad understanding of  technical game development process and pipelines including a strong capability to deliver reliable, performant, and tightly integrated solutions in the Unreal 4 or 5 codebase. 

What your day to day looks like

This role involves about 50% independent work, and 50% collaboration during a typical work week. For example, you may work on a tricky bug for a few days without much interaction with other people; other times, you’ll jump into unfamiliar code, ask the right questions, and provide critical feedback and insight.

You’ll primarily interact with other programmers engaged in more technical discussions in 1:1 or small team settings.

You need to be comfortable asking questions, providing technical feedback, and explaining your work. Depending on the task, you may need to do this frequently (multiple times a day).

Our smaller studio size, open studio culture, cross-project, and Central Dev aspects of the role will require you to communicate across all disciplines at the studio on a regular basis.

Your Responsibilities

• Generalist—You'll implement and maintain various game-focused programming systems, such as cameras, player input, low-level systems, asset integration, physics simulation, porting legacy code, build systems, audio, animation, game AI, and other areas as needed by our game projects.
• Core Systems -You'll regularly collaborate with the programming teams on our various projects to identify common technical patterns, architect cross-title solutions, and help build a studio-wide shared code base.
• Optimizing, Debugging, and Refactoring - You'll spend significant time working with existing code to improve performance, reduce hitches, fix bugs, and increase the code clarity of our tools and games.
• Integrations—You'll periodically download and merge Unreal and other third-party code updates using source control systems into our local code base. You'll also work with project teams on stable integrations of updates into game projects throughout all stages of production.

Your Qualifications 

You have a solid understanding of the low-level technical systems required to drive and develop a video game.

• Do you have baseline proficiency in C++?
• Have you implemented a game engine from scratch or made significant changes to an existing engine like UE or Godot? 
• Can you point to low-level optimizations or bug fixes that demonstrate knowledge of how contemporary hardware works and how to leverage it effectively? 
• Do you have experience building solutions in large, complex codebases, combined with an ability to reason about and measure the performance impact of your work?

You have experience shipping and finalizing a video game on a modern console or PC.

• Have you significantly contributed to the efforts and understand the unique challenges that occur in the shipping and finalizing stages of game development?
• Do you have a sense of the detail-oriented work needed for certification, optimization, and packaging on consoles that are platform-specific (Xbox, PS5, Switch)?