A natural leader, you’re ambitious yet humble and eager to work with a collaborative and diverse group across multiple sites. You’re not afraid to get hands-on in inspiring a team towards greatness and see the world of gaming as so much more than a hobby. Elevating our design team as whole, you’ll bring in new ideas, iterate among colleagues and collaborate with interdisciplinary teams to innovate and iterate player-focused design.
Sound like a match? Kabam Austin is looking for a talented and passionate Lead Designer to develop the overall vision for the game, including tone, story, platform, content, gameplay and licensed IP.
In this role, you can expect to:
- Lead a small development team through ideation via rapid-prototyping, rigorous hypothesis and interrogation, and carefully directed areas of exploration
- Create cutting-edge free-to-play mobile games that the world loves to play
- Collaborate with the producer and co-leads across programming, level design, UI, art and animation departments
- Evaluate, break down and assign the work load to the team assigned to him/her as well as get the team commitment
- Apply creative direction and critique and promote proactive collaboration with his/her team, producers, and co-leads
- Responsible to communicate early any potential risk if a deadline will not be met
- Design team management, annual evaluations and career development of his/her teammates.
- Collaborate with the artistic groups (environment art, UI, etc) in order to balance/align visual looks with gameplay functionalities.
At Kabam, we’re constantly raising the bar of excellence in free-to-play mobile gaming. We hire for passion and diversity so that together as a team we can triumph in our collective skill. Our teams are made up of a fusion of personalities and interests bound together by a collaborative nature, fun-loving culture and drive to do what it takes to make great games. And this is where you come in…
Your background includes:
- 7-10+ years of game development experience
- Shipped at least 2 AAA titles on any platform
- You’re an ongoing and relevant consumer of industry-leading titles, especially in F2P
- Bachelor’s degree or equivalent industry experience with an emphasis on game design, economics, math, or psychology
- Leadership ability, strong interpersonal and communication skills
- Experience with coordinating, mentoring and building a cohesive design team
- Articulate in what good design practices look like
- You love to be hands-on -- scripting, building, proving out your vision is important to you
- Strong approach to diagnosing not-quite-working design ideas and prescribe elegant solutions
- Art or engineering skills a definite plus
- Excellent organization and writing skills
- An inherent desire to solve exciting and challenging problems
- Ultimate problem solving, critical thinking, logical, and analytical skills
- Deep familiarity with RPG, BCG, and action genres on mobile, PC, console, and pen-and-paper platforms
- Experience managing licensing partners is a big plus
Here are the technical aspects you will bring with you:
- Maintain a diligent watch over the documentation being produced
- Act as the game design ambassador, prepare presentation for the team and external partners
- Unity/C# experience
- Unreal Engine 4 experience is a plus (Blueprint)
- Spreadsheet wizardry
Excited by this opportunity? We invite you to Apply Now and tell us what games have influenced you. Together, we can create some of the best games ever made.
About Kabam
Kabam is a world leader of free-to-play games for mobile devices. Console quality graphics and next generation technology are the hallmark of Kabam games. Kabam merges the art of game design and the science of consumer behaviour to create immersive games enjoyed by players around the world. Kabam’s games have generated hundreds of millions of downloads including Marvel Contest of Champions and Transformers: Forged to Fight and won several awards including Apple Editor’s Choice and Google Play’s Best Game of the Year. Kabam has studios and offices in Vancouver, San Francisco and Austin. Kabam is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Netmarble Games.