Staff Software Engineer at Level

Level is a learning technology company dedicated to helping students build real academic and life skills with confidence and joy. We combine proven curriculum principles with world class interactive design to make meaningful practice something students want to come back to, not something they struggle through. We support what teachers, schools, and parents are already doing by increasing student engagement with high quality, standards aligned practice that reinforces classroom learning. That’s why we’re building: For students: Rewarding and motivating learning experiences that meet students where they are to build real academic proficiency. For educators: Tools that fit naturally into instruction and help students stay engaged while reducing teacher workload. For parents: Activities that help your kid catch up or get ahead, build confidence, and minimize homework battles, whether learning at school or at home. We are committed to helping every person maximize their potential and live a life of meaning. It’s a difficult problem that requires brilliant people and tremendous effort over time. As a Staff Software Engineer, you will be a pivotal technical leader, architecting and driving the development of the core technologies and systems underpinning our games. Operating with significant autonomy in a dynamic development environment, you'll tackle complex, often ambiguous challenges crucial to delivering high-quality, performant, and engaging games. What You Will Do: - Architect Core Game Systems: Design, develop, and lead the implementation of major systems and foundational technologies for our games. - Define Technical Strategy in Ambiguity: Navigate complex game development challenges and technical unknowns. Identify key technical risks and opportunities, define strategic approaches and create robust, scalable technical designs. - Drive Performance & Innovation: Champion high-quality, maintainable code while pursuing performance optimization. - Cross-Disciplinary Leadership: Collaborate closely with technical leadership, game designers, artists, producers, and other engineers to translate creative visions and design goals into concrete, high-performance technical solutions and roadmaps. - Establish Engineering Best Practices: Help establish and embody a culture of technical excellence, collaboration, and iterative development. - Own Critical Technical Domains: Take ownership of complex technical areas vital to our games' success, driving their evolution, stability, and performance. - Proactive Technical Problem Solving: Anticipate and address technical challenges, performance bottlenecks, architectural limitations, and potential scaling issues before they impact development or players. - Other tasks related or beneficial to the above or the work of the Company. What You Need: - Extensive, expert-level development experience using C/C++/C#, demonstrating mastery in building complex, performant, real-time systems. - Significant experience architecting and developing core systems for complex, interactive applications. - Deep proficiency with real-time engines, including experience modifying or extending engine systems to suit unique application needs. - Demonstrated ability to design, document, and implement complex, scalable, and maintainable software architectures, especially in new or evolving domains. - Proven track record of thriving in fast-paced, ambiguous environments. Ability to define technical direction, make critical decisions with incomplete information, and lead projects with significant scope from inception. - Exceptional ability to communicate complex technical ideas clearly and collaborate effectively with diverse teams (technical and non-technical) in a dynamic, potentially remote setting. - Ability and willingness to mentor other engineers and contribute positively to team growth and culture. Nice to Have: - 10+ years of professional software engineering experience, with at least 5 years in game development. - Multiple shipped commercial game titles with demonstrable contributions to core engine systems or foundational architecture. - Contributions to game development communities, GDC talks, published technical writing, or open-source projects. - Experience working across distributed studios in multiple time zones with asynchronous collaboration workflows.