Lead Software Engineer, Tactical Shooter (Unreal Engine 5) at Blackbirdinteractive

Blackbird Interactive is a creative-fueled, future-driven, independent game studio where the best talent in the industry can find long-term careers to help grow their abilities while working on a wide range of projects. That includes world-class IPs as well as our own creations across multiple genres. We are looking for a Lead Software Engineer to help drive the technical direction and execution of a third person tactical shooter being developed in Unreal Engine 5 for PC. You will lead engineering efforts across core gameplay systems, AI, combat support systems, navigation, and performance-critical runtime features that are essential to delivering a polished, scalable, and highly responsive tactical action experience. This role is remote-friendly in Canada with Pacific-time overlap required. What You’ll Lead and Deliver: • Lead the technical direction and implementation of core gameplay and runtime systems for a third person tactical shooter in Unreal Engine 5. • Own the architecture and long-term health of gameplay-adjacent systems including AI support, combat frameworks, traversal, movement, navigation, encounter scripting support, and systemic runtime features. • Partner closely with design, animation, technical design, and content teams to build responsive, maintainable systems that support tactical combat, squad behaviors, player control fidelity, and encounter scalability. • Drive engineering quality across gameplay code, emphasizing performance, maintainability, extensibility, and production-readiness. • Architect and optimize systems related to AI movement, perception, decision support, tactical positioning, spatial queries, pathfinding integration, and dynamic navigation behavior. • Support large and complex gameplay spaces by improving runtime performance, memory use, system reliability, and frame-time stability across a wide range of PC hardware configurations. • Establish engineering best practices for Unreal Engine 5 development, including code review standards, debugging workflows, profiling habits, and technical planning. • Collaborate with technical leadership to break down risks, define implementation strategies, and align engineering execution with project goals and production timelines. • Mentor engineers through design reviews, hands-on problem solving, and day-to-day technical guidance. Contribute to hiring, onboarding, and raising the overall quality bar of the team. • Communicate clearly with stakeholders about technical constraints, trade-offs, dependencies, and execution plans. You’ll Thrive Here If You: • Have 5+ years of professional game development experience, with demonstrated technical leadership through project ownership, mentorship, and setting engineering standards. • Have strong professional experience with C++ and Unreal Engine, including gameplay architecture, runtime systems, debugging, and optimization. • Have shipped or significantly contributed to the development of complex action, shooter, AI-heavy, or systemic gameplay features in a production environment. • Have deep experience building and maintaining gameplay systems that are responsive, scalable, and designer-friendly. • Understand the technical demands of third person action or tactical shooter gameplay, including movement responsiveness, encounter complexity, AI coordination, combat readability, and runtime performance. • Are comfortable working across systems boundaries, collaborating with multiple disciplines, and balancing short-term production needs with long-term technical health. • Bring a strong ownership mindset, practical decision-making, and a focus on helping teams move effectively under production constraints. Bonus XP: • Experience building third person shooter, tactical combat, or AI-driven gameplay systems. • Strong understanding of navigation systems, pathfinding, spatial reasoning, and runtime query performance. • Experience integrating or working with pathfinding middleware such as Mercuna. • Familiarity with navmesh generation, dynamic navigation updates, hierarchical pathfinding, flow fields, cover queries, tactical positioning systems, or related navigation algorithms. • Experience supporting AI at scale, including movement through complex environments, multi-agent coordination, and performance optimization for simulation-heavy gameplay. • Experience with Unreal Engine 5 systems relevant to gameplay and AI, such as Behavior Trees, EQS, AI Controllers, Character Movement, Gameplay Ability System, animation integration, and network-aware gameplay architecture. • Experience profiling and optimizing CPU-heavy gameplay and AI systems on PC.