What You’ll Lead and Deliver
- Lead the effort to port and harden a proprietary AAA game engine for current gen consoles, ensuring performance, stability, and production readiness.
- Own the platform and console roadmap for core engine-facing systems across PC and consoles, balancing performance, reliability, and delivery timelines.
- Drive engine-level performance improvements focused on frame-time stability, hitch reduction, load-time reduction, memory efficiency, and scalability across CPU cores.
- Architect and optimize memory systems including allocators, pools, tagging, lifetime tracking, streaming heaps, fragmentation mitigation, OOM safety, and platform budget enforcement.
- Build and evolve I/O and streaming foundations including async file I/O, decompression pipelines, asset streaming, prioritization, bandwidth and latency hiding, and patch-friendly data layouts.
- Improve CPU scheduling and concurrency including job systems, task granularity, contention reduction, cache locality, false sharing mitigation, and thread affinity strategies.
- Lead platform integration and abstraction layers with clean separation between platform-specific code and cross-platform engine systems. Maintain SDK-facing pipelines and compliance readiness.
- Establish performance guardrails including budgets, best practices, validation checks, regression detection, automated benchmarks and captures, and telemetry for early detection of issues.
- Partner cross-discipline with gameplay, rendering, audio, content, and build and release teams to align features and content goals with platform constraints and budgets.
- Mentor and raise the bar through design reviews, debugging approaches, and best practices. Contribute to hiring, onboarding, and team standards.
- Communicate clearly to production and stakeholders on constraints, trade-offs, risks, and actionable plans for platform readiness.
You'll Thrive Here if you
- 5+ years of professional game development or performance-critical systems experience, with demonstrated technical leadership through project ownership, mentorship, and setting standards.
- Expert-level modern C++ and systems debugging skills including multithreading, low-lock patterns, profiling-driven optimization, and low-level investigations.
- Deep understanding of console constraints and performance fundamentals including CPU architecture, cache and memory hierarchy, storage, I/O characteristics, and platform-specific trade-offs.
- Track record of shipping or supporting production console titles and improving stability, frame pacing, memory behavior, and load times in real-world conditions.
- Comfortable defining and enforcing budgets for CPU, memory, and I/O, and partnering with content teams to keep the game performant and stable.
- Strong ownership mindset with a focus on maintainable solutions, practical prioritization, and team success under deadlines.
Pluses
- Shipped at least one title on PS5, Xbox Series X|S, and or Nintendo hardware, especially in platform, performance, or engine roles.
- Hands-on expertise with custom allocators, memory tagging, fragmentation analysis, and crash and telemetry-driven stability improvements.
- Proven experience with streaming and async loading systems including decompression, on-demand loading, prioritization, and large-world or content-heavy constraints.
- Experience with job systems and frame-time stability work including contention, false sharing, CPU and GPU sync points, and task scheduling strategies.
- Strong familiarity with platform profiling workflows and internal diagnostics including PIX and equivalent console tooling.
Top Skills
What We Do
Blackbird Interactive (BBI) is a creative-fueled, future-driven, independent studio - behind such games as Homeworld: Deserts of Kharak, Hardspace: Shipbreaker, and the upcoming Homeworld 3, Minecraft Legends, and Crossfire: Legion.
Founded by Rob Cunningham, Yossarian King, and Aaron Kambeitz in 2010, the award-winning Vancouver studio boast its own internal CG cinematics department, led by the founder of Pixar Canada, and has also been involved in various game-adjacent projects over the years - such as Project Eagle with the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and other initiatives with the eatART Foundation and Sanctuary AI.









