Unreal Programmer

Why Goose Byte

Do you wish that you could spend your work hours actually making games? We’re offering that low-overhead-indie-team-productivity along with all of the stability and I-can-sleep-at-night big studio perks.

We’re cultivating an inclusive, high performance, talent dense team where collaboration is key and we won’t be tolerating talented jerks. High integrity is important and we nurture an environment built around the concepts of freedom, inclusivity, respect, sustainability, and trust.

Our growing team is looking for a programmer who can bring a deeper understanding of our main technology choice: Unreal Engine. This can be seen as a hybrid role that lands somewhere in the mix between ‘engine’, ‘generalist’ and ‘gameplay’. The player-facing gameplay systems to be tackled will pose a larger technical challenge, or performance risk, in our open world multiplayer environment. This person will be trusted to spend time working on innovations and finding ways to push technological boundaries.

Our First Project

For our first project we’re making an open world survival crafting game that focuses on exploration and creativity over violence and combat, finding a unique space in a crowded genre to bring something exciting and different to players.

We’re creating our own IP, building on our love of science fiction, worldbuilding, and unconventional games, and as an indie studio we have full creative freedom and control.

Using our experience from leading AAA open world and action adventure games we’re thinking practically and pragmatically about our choices, from technology, to scope of features, and where to place our bets for quality and innovation.

There are lots of challenges ahead but we are setting our own ambitions and expectations, leveraging our scale to be decisive, move quickly, and make the game better every day.

Your Opportunities

You are definitely a match if you are excited by these opportunities…

• Focus on game dev, first and foremost. Always know the next three tasks you want to tackle
• Assure the quality of your work is consistent week by week
• When approaching your work, put yourself in the shoes of a designer, a programmer, an artist, and the player to better understand how your work will be used
• Create new systems that work on a large scale in an open world
• Working on lower level gameplay systems, providing the team and project with solid foundations to build on
• Optimise from the function level, all the way up to the pipeline level, improving the project and the team’s productivity
• Contribute to the project replication patterns, aiming to support dedicated servers and utilising the replication graph to the maximum
• Create MVPs for the wider team to expand upon, working smart and fast to find the fun in the game
• Sync with the team and research their wants and dreams, use that as inspiration for your API design
• Dabble in all of the creative disciplines and continue to advance your game dev career

Values

Each colleague that joins our studio is equally important to its success. As such, all of our benefits are available to everyone, effective from their first day with us. Being transparent about this equality and how we value our employees is a key part of who we are.

Freedom

• Hybrid Remote work – we primarily work from home with provided high-end hardware and collaboration tools. We meet once a week in our Montreal office for collaborative work and socializing.
• Flexible schedule
• $1,000 yearly employee lifestyle fund – use this to stay healthy, social, comfortable or productive

Inclusivity

• Equal opportunity and equal pay employer
• Team building and social events in Montreal
• Zero tolerance policy on harassment, bullying and discrimination
• No talented jerks

Respect

• Competitive base salaries for all jobs
• Low admin and manager overhead – No boring recurring meetings
• An uncapped profitability bonus scheme that shares studio profits with everyone
• We offer everyone dedicated high end hardware to maximise productivity

Sustainability

• Commitment to a Crunch-free environment
• Competitive Group Insurance Plan (Healthcare, Vision, Dental, Life Insurance, Telemedicine)
• Retirement fund – We match 50% of all employee RRSP contributions
• Studio shuts down one week for Winter Holidays

Trust

• Unlimited paid vacation for all employees – this means 5 weeks minimum
• Unlimited sick days / Family days / Flexi days
• All benefits start day one, for all employees

Get On Our Radar

We value diverse backgrounds and fresh perspectives. We hire based on future potential, not only your past experiences.

For an Unreal programmer we’d expect for you to have opinions on how to (and how not to) architect performant systems, build features that align with Unreal Engine’s technical design, optimise production ready code, and have collected your fair share of ‘debugging nightmare’ stories.

The main technologies we use at the moment are:

• Unreal Engine 5
• GitHub
• Google Workspace

If you already have skills here it’s a great bonus!

So…

If you made it here and this sounds like a great fit for you, then what are you waiting for!