We are looking for a Senior Technical Director to help define, strengthen, and scale technical leadership across Blackbird Interactive's portfolio and business development efforts. This role is about providing high-level engineering direction at the studio level: leading technical leadership across multiple projects, supporting technical strategy for proposals and project setup, and ensuring our teams have the systems, staffing, and guidance they need to succeed. You will work closely with project leads, production, studio leadership, and business development to help ensure our games and proposals are technically sound, strategically scoped, and built for long-term success.
What You'll Lead and Deliver
Lead engineering leadership across the studio, directly managing technical leads spanning 4 to 8 active projects. Support their technical decision-making, team effectiveness, and execution quality.
Own hiring for key technical roles, including technical leads and senior engineering individual contributors. Partner with project leadership to define needs, assess candidates, and build strong teams with the right mix of experience and specialization.
Drive technical assessment for partner opportunities, including remasters, ports, live operations, and other proposals. Review existing codebases across proprietary and commercial engines, identify risks and constraints, inform estimates, and staffing plans.
Help set new projects up for success by establishing strong technical foundations early, including build and release pipelines, middleware evaluations, engineering staffing needs, and development workflows that support long-term delivery.
Provide ongoing engineering leadership across the portfolio, helping teams respond to emergent technical issues, production pressure, platform complexity, performance concerns, integration challenges, and architectural drift.
Partner closely with Production and project leadership to track technical risks, schedule impacts, capacity constraints, and expertise gaps. Help teams make informed tradeoffs and ensure technical realities are reflected clearly in project planning.
- Champion engineering standards and cross-functional alignment, improving technical planning, architecture review, dependency management, and collaboration across engineering, production, design, art, QA, and partner teams.
You'll Thrive Here If You
You have significant experience in game development in a senior engineering leadership role, with a track record of influencing technical direction and delivery across multiple projects.
You've managed technical leaders and know how to support them in both people leadership and technical decision-making.
You're comfortable assessing unfamiliar codebases quickly and forming clear opinions about technical feasibility, architectural risk, staffing implications, and delivery complexity.
You've worked with both proprietary and commercial engines, and you understand the realities of remasters, ports, live ops, co-development, and partner-driven production environments.
You know how to set projects up well from the beginning, including build pipelines, tooling, middleware choices, team composition, and technical planning practices that reduce risk over time.
You're effective at stepping into projects that are facing emergent technical problems and helping teams regain clarity, momentum, and technical control without undermining local ownership.
You work well with Production and understand how to translate technical realities into clear conversations about schedule, risk, capacity, and staffing needs.
You're a strong people builder who enjoys hiring, mentoring, and leveling up technical talent, not just solving difficult engineering problems yourself.
You're an excellent communicator who can build confidence with internal teams and external partners, and you balance long-term technical quality with practical execution.
Bonus XP
Experience contributing to business development efforts, including technical due diligence, partner proposals, RFP responses, or project scoping.
Experience across remasters, ports, live operations, co-development, or franchise adaptation work.
Experience working with multiple game engines, including Unreal, Unity, and proprietary technology stacks.
Experience working across AAA, AA, and external partner game projects.
Experience building or improving studio-wide engineering practices, pipelines, or technical review processes.
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.
