Lead Engineer

Lead Engineer

Department: Engineering

Employment Type: Fixed Term - Full Time

Location: Eugene, OR

Compensation: $122,000 - $146,000 / year

Description

Pipeworks Studios is seeking an experienced Lead Engineer to support a AAA development partner on an Unreal Engine project. Working alongside our project engineering lead, you’ll collaborate directly with the partner’s engineering team and coordinate work across external studios, extending the partner’s development capacity while keeping delivery aligned with their priorities and technical standards.

This is a client-facing co-development leadership role, rather than a position centered on hands-on feature development. Your primary contribution will be helping distributed teams work effectively together: understanding the partner’s needs, organizing work, resolving ambiguity, and ensuring implementations meet expectations. Deep Unreal Engine experience and strong technical judgment are essential for evaluating work, guiding engineers, and helping teams overcome technical challenges.

This is a full-time temporary role with the possibility of extension or conversion to regular full-time employment after six months. Our studio is based in Eugene, Oregon, and the role may be performed remotely, in a hybrid arrangement, or in the office. 

Day To Day

Responsibilities

• Build strong working relationships with partner engineers and engineering leadership, serving as a reliable technical contact who understands their goals, communicates clearly, and follows through on commitments. 
• Translate partner priorities into clearly scoped tasks, coordinate estimates and assignments across external studios, and ensure teams understand requirements, dependencies, and acceptance criteria.
• Keep partner and external studio teams aligned through regular communication, clear documentation, and effective handoffs across time zones.
• Review technical designs, code, and in-game results, particularly in gameplay and animation, for correctness, maintainability, performance, and alignment with the partner’s expectations. Provide actionable feedback and follow through on improvements.
• Lead cross-studio technical discussions, clarify requirements, resolve questions, and help teams reach decisions that fit the partner’s existing architecture and development practices.
• Maintain a clear view of progress, blockers, and delivery risks. Work with the partner and production to address issues early and agree on practical adjustments to priorities or scope.
• Coordinate with engineering, design, animation, art, production, and QA to ensure contributions are integrated, tested, and ready for partner review.
• Share leadership responsibilities with the Pipeworks project engineering lead, maintaining enough context to independently handle partner discussions, task coordination, and technical decisions when needed.
• Investigate difficult technical issues and provide hands-on support where needed to unblock teams, while keeping partner collaboration, technical oversight, and coordination as the primary focus.

Skills Knowledge and Expertise

Must Haves

• Clear, direct, professional, and concise communication, including the ability to lead client-facing technical discussions, manage expectations, and explain risks and tradeoffs to technical and non-technical collaborators.
• Demonstrated engineering leadership on complex game projects, including effective delegation, coordination, and accountability for team delivery.
• A collaborative approach to supporting a development partner, with the ability to work within their established priorities, technical direction, codebase, and processes.
• Significant hands-on Unreal Engine experience and strong C++ proficiency in large production codebases.
• Strong technical judgment, debugging, and code-review skills, with broad game engineering knowledge and deep expertise in at least one area.
• Ability to quickly understand an unfamiliar project, identify ambiguity and dependencies, and turn incomplete information into clear questions and actionable next steps.
• Effective organization and follow-through, with the ability to keep distributed teams informed, aligned, and unblocked as priorities evolve.

Nice-To-Have Skills

• Experience in AAA co-development or another client-facing engineering leadership role.
• Experience coordinating multiple external studios or international engineering teams across time zones.
• Gameplay and character animation programming experience sufficient to guide technical discussions, evaluate implementation quality, and help engineers resolve difficult problems.
• Experience supporting late-production integration, bug fixing, and release stabilization.
• Experience working directly with designers and animators to refine gameplay and character animation systems.

Education and Experience

• Substantial professional game engineering experience, including technical leadership and coordination of complex engineering efforts.
• At least one shipped commercial game or another substantial production release is preferred.
• A degree in computer science, engineering, or a related field is helpful but not required when equivalent professional experience is demonstrated. 

What We Can Offer You

A Flexible Working Environment
Almost all of our roles allow for your choice of work location. We're happy to support our team no matter where they prefer to work: remote, in office, or hybrid.

Benefits

• Medical, Dental, and Vision
• 401K with employer match
• Employer Paid Life Insurance Policy
• Generous Paid Time Off
• 18-20 Paid Company Holidays
• Relocation
• Paid Parental Leave
• Employee Assistance Program
• Fitness Club Discounts
• Sports Team Sponsorship
• Annual Company Events
• Project Wrap Parties

A Commitment to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion
Pipeworks Studios recognizes the importance of creating an environment where all of our employees feel included and empowered to bring ideas to the the table. We value each employee's unique experiences and perspectives and recognize that it is both the smart and right thing to foster diversity, equity and inclusion within our organization.

By diversifying our workforce, increasing equity, and ensuring that our individual differences are valued, we are better able to deliver an experience that reflects, inspires, and connects with our audience... because games are for everyone!

Pipeworks provides equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants without regard to race, color, creed, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, age, religion, national origin, citizenship status, disability, or any protected category prohibited by local, state or federal laws.

Go to Pipeworks.com to see some of our continued efforts and our latest Diversity Report.

Studies have shown that women and people of color are less likely to apply for jobs unless they believe they meet every one of the qualifications in a job description. Our top priority is finding the best candidate for the job and if you are interested in the position, we would encourage you to apply, even if you don’t believe you meet every one of the qualifications above.