The Role
Lead client-facing engineering coordination for a AAA Unreal Engine project. Partner with engineering leaders and external studios to scope work, clarify requirements, review designs and code, resolve technical issues, manage risks, and ensure quality delivery across distributed teams. Provide technical guidance in gameplay and animation, support integration and stabilization, and maintain alignment with partner architecture, priorities, and development processes.
Summary Generated by Built In
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 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.
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
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.
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.
About
While you may not know us, you certainly know our clients: Microsoft, Sony, Activision, Electronic Arts, and many more. Since 1999, Pipeworks has been helping define what’s next in real-world interactions by creating innovative, best-selling, cross-platform live games for top-tier publishers and properties.We believe that games have the ability to transform the world outside the realm of traditional consumer games and that our people are the catalyst for making this vision a reality. In the center of our universe lies our people, players, and a deep-rooted passion for games that has created several multi-million dollar best-sellers, compelling original concepts, and a disruptive imagination that continues to explore how games can transform industries outside our own. We are seeking exceptionally talented and entrepreneurial game creators as we lead into the future of digital entertainment.What products, ideas, dreams, and change will you help us create?
Skills Required
- Clear, direct, professional, and concise communication for client-facing technical discussions
- Demonstrated engineering leadership on complex game projects
- Ability to delegate, coordinate, and maintain accountability for team delivery
- Collaborative ability to work within a partner's priorities, technical direction, codebase, and processes
- Significant hands-on Unreal Engine experience
- Strong C++ proficiency in large production codebases
- Strong technical judgment, debugging, and code-review skills
- Broad game engineering knowledge and deep expertise in at least one area
- Ability to understand unfamiliar projects, identify dependencies, and turn incomplete information into actionable next steps
- Effective organization and follow-through with distributed teams
- Experience in AAA co-development or client-facing engineering leadership
- Experience coordinating multiple external studios or international engineering teams across time zones
- Gameplay and character animation programming experience
- Experience with late-production integration, bug fixing, and release stabilization
- Experience working directly with designers and animators on gameplay and character animation systems
- Substantial professional game engineering experience with technical leadership and coordination of complex engineering efforts
- At least one shipped commercial game or substantial production release
- Degree in computer science, engineering, or a related field, or equivalent professional experience
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The Company
What We Do
You may not know us, but you certainly know our clients: Microsoft, Sony, Activision, Square and many others. At Pipeworks, we create innovative, best-selling, transplatform live games for top-tier publishers and properties. We have been creating hits since 1999, and we are seeking exceptionally talented and entrepreneurial game creators as we lead into the future of digital entertainment. Our studio is creative and collaborative, our projects are exciting and challenging, and our people are rockstars without the ego. We are located in the beautiful Pacific Northwest in downtown Eugene, Oregon – the home of the University of Oregon and a great place to work, live, and play.
