Lead UI Engineer - STARCRAFT | Irvine, CA
Blizzard Entertainment1 month ago
Base Salary
$124k - $229k/yr
Responsibilities
- Lead the technical vision, implementation strategy, architecture, development, and maintenance of game UI systems.
- Guide UI engineers through mentorship, technical leadership, prioritization, and day-to-day execution.
- Establish engineering standards, best practices, and code quality expectations for UI development.
- Collaborate with designers, artists, engineers, production partners, and technical leadership to deliver player experiences and align milestones.
- Optimize UI performance, memory usage, and platform compatibility for PC, Xbox, and PlayStation.
- Improve UI pipelines, tools, workflows, and content creation processes.
- Review designs and technical proposals while balancing creative goals with technical requirements.
- Foster collaboration, continuous learning, knowledge sharing, accountability, and professional growth.
Requirements
- 8+ years of professional software engineering experience, including significant experience developing UI systems for games or interactive applications.
- Experience leading engineers, technical initiatives, or feature teams through the full development lifecycle.
- Experience managing people, programs, or multidisciplinary efforts to achieve business and development objectives.
- Experience shipping at least one commercially released title or large-scale interactive product.
- Strong proficiency in C++ and modern software architecture principles.
- Extensive experience building UI systems, frameworks, and tooling for game development.
- Experience integrating UI with gameplay systems, backend services, and platform features.
- Comprehensive understanding of performance optimization, memory management, and debugging practices.
- Experience with Unreal Engine and related UI technologies.
- Experience leading technical reviews, architecture discussions, and engineering planning efforts.
- Strong understanding of accessibility and player-centered design principles.
- Experience developing for PC, Xbox, and/or PlayStation.
- Collaborative communication, technical influence, ownership, initiative, and a commitment to mentoring and continuous improvement.
- Preferred qualifications include leading UI engineering teams on AAA projects, developing UI editor tooling, supporting live-service or online features, integrating telemetry or analytics, working on action, role-playing, social, or open-world games, and contributing to recruiting, interviewing, and engineer career development.
- Required application materials are a resume and optionally a cover letter, plus a portfolio, website, or examples of technical contributions if available.
Benefits
- Hybrid work week combining work-from-home and on-site days at the Irvine studio.
- Medical, dental, vision, health savings or health reimbursement accounts, healthcare spending accounts, dependent care spending accounts, life and AD&D insurance, and disability insurance.
- 401(k) with company match, tuition reimbursement, and charitable donation matching.
- Paid holidays and vacation, paid sick time, floating holidays, compassion and bereavement leave, and parental leave.
- Mental health and wellbeing programs, fitness programs, free and discounted games, and other voluntary benefit programs.
- Potential relocation assistance if the company requires geographic relocation for the job.
- Benefits are subject to eligibility requirements and may vary for part-time and temporary full-time employees and interns.
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.