About Us
Charm Games is an independent studio of veteran game developers founded in 2015 and based in Vancouver, BC, Canada. We create beautiful adventures in virtual reality, like our award-winning 2017 VR Game of the Year finalist FORM (IGN, UploadVR).
About the Position
The Technical Director (Unreal) - Virtual Reality role is a leadership position responsible for establishing a sense of trust in our technology and tools stack across our entire Unreal development team. This position will require a deep desire to understand and influence how all our technical systems - engine, art pipeline, design tools, and more - combine into a memorable experience that delivers more than the sum of its parts. This role is a great fit for an experienced technical leader and mentor, or someone who has demonstrated readiness for a technical leadership role through their empathetic and supportive communication with less experienced team members. You'll succeed in this role if you're excited by the chance to use your deep technical expertise in service of creating world-class entertainment in virtual reality.
This is an in-office or remote permanent full-time position, initially encompassing work on two new unannounced multi-platform VR titles with publisher and platform partner support. The successful candidate will be based in the Pacific time zone and must be eligible to work in Canada.
What you'll do:
- With the Game Director, lead the feature development process and contribute decisive recommendations to control scope and risk while maintaining quality
- Supervise the software development process, by setting short term objectives based on the project's feature roadmap
- Develop and apply novel solutions to CPU and GPU performance challenges within very narrow hardware constraints
- Provide feedback and mentorship to team members in technical roles while upholding coding standards through code reviews
- Create and enforce performance standards by establishing and communicating frame-time budgets and working with others to optimize scripts and assets
- Establish and supervise the technical quality assurance process, including integration and functional testing
- Manage the release pipeline, version control, and build distribution, plus meet archiving requirements for external partners
- Maintain and disseminate up-to-date knowledge of software development best practices, emerging tools and technologies, and industry trends
- When relevant, maintain separation in code between internally owned tools and practices from partner-owned finished work
- Write, source feedback on, and revise any technical documentation required by external partners
What you'll bring:
- Prior successful shipped work in a senior technical role on a title developed in Unreal, with accompanying expertise using C/C++
- Demonstrated ability to get excellent qualitative results by supporting teammates doing tech-adjacent work in non-technical roles on art, design, sound, and other areas
- Prior shipped work on mobile hardware, while working with a mobile-optimized art pipeline
- Proficiency optimizing performance within the Unreal render pipeline
- Demonstrated application of memory management techniques in performance-critical contexts
- Experience working on a project with external publishing or production partners and successfully delivering work within defined milestone schedules
- Experience developing and maintaining a continuous integration and automated testing pipeline within Unreal
Pluses:
- Proficiency with Unity on par with Unreal - especially on work migrated from Unity to Unreal - with accompanying experience using C#
- Experience or formal education in a non-technical field relevant to game development, or in a game development-adjacent creative industry
- Experience on a project with a significant procedural generation element, or with procedural generation art pipeline tools - e.g. Houdini
- Experience working on a virtual reality project