Gameplay Engineer, NPC - StarCraft | Irvine, CA
Blizzard Entertainment2 months ago
Responsibilities
- Design, develop, and maintain gameplay systems for NPC behaviors and interactions.
- Implement scalable NPC gameplay features for varied gameplay scenarios.
- Collaborate with designers, animators, artists, AI specialists, and engineers to create NPC experiences.
- Develop tools, workflows, and debugging solutions for efficient content creation and iteration.
- Optimize gameplay performance, stability, and maintainability of NPC systems.
- Prototype gameplay features and evaluate them through iteration and playtesting.
- Investigate, diagnose, and resolve gameplay and NPC-related issues.
- Contribute to technical design discussions and engineering best practices.
Requirements
- At least 5 years of professional gameplay programming experience in the game industry.
- Strong proficiency in C++ software development.
- Experience developing gameplay features in Unreal Engine.
- Experience shipping or contributing to a commercial game title.
- Understanding of NPC architecture, state machines, behavior systems, navigation, and character interactions.
- Experience debugging and optimizing gameplay systems in large-scale codebases.
- Knowledge of maintainable, scalable, and performant software engineering principles.
- Experience collaborating with cross-functional development and content creation teams.
- Strong problem-solving, analytical, communication, ownership, and accountability skills.
- Preferred experience includes NPC, creature, combat, RPG, action RPG, social, networked multiplayer, live game, animation, character-pipeline, and developer-tool development.
- Portfolio, code samples, or shipped game contributions demonstrating gameplay engineering expertise.
Benefits
- Hybrid work arrangement with work-from-home and on-site days based out of the Irvine studio.
- Medical, dental, vision, health savings or reimbursement accounts, healthcare and dependent care spending accounts, insurance, and disability coverage.
- 401(k) with company match, tuition reimbursement, and charitable donation matching.
- Paid holidays, vacation, sick time, floating holidays, bereavement and compassion leave, and parental leave.
- Mental health, wellbeing, fitness, free and discounted games, and other voluntary benefit programs.
- Potential relocation assistance if the company requires geographic relocation for the role.
Tech Stack
C++Unreal Engine
Categories
Gaming
About Blizzard Entertainment
Blizzard Entertainment develops and publishes video games for PC and consoles, including World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Diablo, StarCraft, and Hearthstone, supported by Battle.net services and esports. Founded in 1991 (as Silicon & Synapse) and headquartered in Irvine, California, it operates within Activision Blizzard, which was acquired by Microsoft in 2023. Its business model spans premium games, expansions, a World of Warcraft subscription, and in-game purchases for live-service titles.