Senior Technical Designer

Job Description

DESIGN

What We Do

Put your design skills to work at a cutting-edge company that challenges the norm. From character and level design to competitive gameplay and system design, help shape the future of interactive entertainment at Epic.

What You'll Do

Epic Games is looking for Senior Technical Designers to join our team working on Fortnite. As a Senior Technical Designer, you'll play a directing role in an initiative based cross-disciplinary team that improves the health and quality of Fortnite. Your expertise in game design and your exemplary technical skills will identify and help implement the most cost-effective technical solutions to problems that designers face. You'll be supported by engineers and design leadership as you pick your own impact on the design group you're assigned to. Much of your work will be informed by dogfooding periods of implementing industry shaping design content that ships with Fortnite. You'll use that hands-on experience to inform choices about tech debt, new design creation, tools, human processes, and strategic goals in an environment that values your input and expects you to solve big problems that affect everyone in your design group. While most of Fortnite functions on a seasonal cadence, you'll work closely with a producer to make sure your team is solving problems that are too big to fix the right way in a single season.

In This Role You Will
• Create design content that pushes the envelope of what's possible in Fortnite
• Identify shortcomings in all workflows you encounter and either fix them yourself, or refer them to the proper engineering resources
• Assess technical debt in the systems you touch, and take ownership over reducing or managing that debt
• Help non-technical designers use their tools to the fullest potential
• Be the first person to try out new tools and provide detailed and valuable feedback to developers
• Stay fully versed in the current and long-term design objectives of your design group, and represent those objectives in engineering discussions
• Make key UX decisions in how tools and workflows should function
• Set up reusable, generalizable, maintainable code or blueprints for your design group to use
• Liaise with performance teams and art teams to ensure your design group can meet technical requirements
• Shoulder complex content debugging problems
• Document and teach best practices for the tools your design group relies on

What We're Looking For

Tech Design is a broad discipline, and nearly every Technical Designer has a different specialization. You should check a lot of these boxes, but we don't expect anyone to check them all. You might even have some of your own boxes to add to the list.
• Game Tool Design
• 2D UX Design, wireframes, mockups
• UMG / Editor Utility Widgets
• Workflow Design
• Technical Game System Design
• Data Asset Architecture
• Spreadsheet Automation
• Strong software architecture in Blueprints
• Algorithm efficiency and robustness
• Impeccable ability to translate between engineers and designers
• Memory Profiling and Reporting
• Art systems understanding
• Multi-platform publishing experience
• Technical debt triage
• Workflow Designer
• Concept-to-release knowledge of asset pipelines
• Experience in many areas of game design
• UR/Analytics experience, tool metrics, user studies
• Software Product Owner experience
• Technical Firefighting
• Uncanny debugging skills
• Thriving on crisis-to-crisis pacing
• Perfect attention to detail in the last minute of release cycles
• Source control expertise
• Technical Shepherd
• An addiction to code reviews/blueprint reviews
• Excellent teaching skills from lunch-n-learns to conferences
• Documentation maven
• Demonstrable technical excellence in design tasks
• That task that required someone to touch every file in the repository
• Get-It-Done Generalist Designer
• Indie/Solo dev experience
• Rapid learn-as-you-go mentality
• 3D Art/Animation/AI Skills
• You're user-focused, passionate, scrappy, solutions-focused, and innovative. These traits equal success at Epic and influence everything we do.

This position is open in multiple locations across North America and Europe including (but are not limited to):
• Cary, North Carolina
• Seattle, Washington
• Los Angeles, California

Jobcode: Reference SBJ-d2q516-18-191-21-86-42 in your application.