Senior Gameplay Engineer

About this role

WE ARE GAME MAKERS

Who we are:

We are a diverse team of developers driven by a passion for our art, united by our core values and inspired by a culture of inclusivity to build amazing games that thrill players everywhere. We pursue growth and innovation in an environment of safety and trust. Our culture is built on the belief that the more varied voices in our collective will strengthen our team and our games. We are looking for our next teammate who will raise our bar and make us better.

What we need:

31st Union is looking for a Senior Gameplay Engineer to develop our Player Bots — AI agents that stand in for human players in our AAA free-to-play, cross-platform action game. Using C++, Unreal Engine 5, and our in-house utility AI framework, you will make bots that fight, traverse, loot, and team up convincingly enough that players second-guess whether they’re facing a human. The same bots power mode backfill and automated testing at scale.

Responsibilities:

•
Develop combat behavior: target prioritization, hero-appropriate weapon and ability use, movement, and disengagement

•
Develop humanization: tunable aim, reaction time, and error models across difficulty levels

•
Develop macro behavior: team cohesion, traversal, pacing, events, looting, and progression

•
Extend our utility AI framework: new behaviors, scoring, and tuning

•
Keep bot populations performant: throttling, suspension, and LOD

•
Extend bots as automated test clients, from feature tests to match-scale load tests

•
Build bot evaluation tooling: debug visualization and playtest metrics

•
Partner with design to tune behavior through playtests

Who you are:

•
5+ years of gameplay or game AI engineering on shipped action games

•
Strong C++ and Unreal Engine fluency, including AI controllers, navigation, and EQS

•
Utility AI or comparable decision-making architectures

•
AI in networked multiplayer: client/server authority, prediction, dedicated servers

•
Humanlike combat AI: aim and error models, reaction time, believable movement

•
Optimizing many concurrent agents: LOD and tick throttling

Nice-to-Haves:

•
Player bots in a competitive shooter

•
Unreal Engine 5, StateTree, and the Gameplay Ability System

•
Control systems (e.g., PID controllers) and input simulation

•
Automated test clients and load testing

The pay range for this position in California…