Lead Software Engineer (Gameplay)

Playrix; United States; Remote; USD 150,000 - 190,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Open communication

Code quality focus

Career development opportunities

Job summary

Playrix is seeking a Lead Software Engineer to drive the technical development of our AI-first workflow integration across games. You will lead architecture, quality, and engineering practices, mentoring developers and shaping how AI tools are adopted.

The role focuses on building features, optimizing performance, and ensuring production-ready code for Match-3 titles and other projects. Experience with C++/Unity is valued, but we provide an adaptation path for beginners, emphasizing rapid

Qualifications

• At least 3 years of experience in developing commercial projects in C++ and/or Unity.
• Experience in developing projects released in production.
• At least one year of experience managing a team of programmers (3+ people).
• An understanding of AI infrastructure and modern tools, and the ability to integrate them into the development process.

Responsibilities

• People management: responsible for development, hiring/firing, team evaluation.
• Development of processes within teams, including AI practices scaling.
• Producing: solving complex technical problems, developing solution architecture and rapid implementation.
• Supervising the stability and quality of game software.
• Carrying out code review and design review.
• Programming and refactoring of game logic.

Skills

C++

Unity

Team leadership

AI infrastructure

Tools

OpenGL ES

Metal

CI/CD

Job description

About the role

To improve the quality of our products and take them to the next level, we're building an AI-first culture within our engineering teams. This means developing agentic workflows, implementing new tools, measuring gains in development speed, and paying special attention to the quality of the results. That's why we're looking for top-level engineers ready to support and develop these practices with us.

Experience in C++ and/or game development is not at all necessary—we have an excellent adaptation system that facilitates a comfortable transition for beginners from Unity and other industries.

The Lead Software Engineer drives the technical development of a product. This person leads and develops the team across architecture, quality, development culture, and engineering practices.

In each project we have the following areas:

• Feature: develop events and mini-games from scratch (ranging from various competitions to mini-games like Merge)

• Technical: optimization, technical stability support, SDK (reducing loading speed, memory consumption, etc.)

• Match-3 and meta: working with graphics and basic mechanics of the game (adding new functionality, refactoring and optimization)

Responsibilities

• People management: responsible for development, hiring/firing, team evaluation

• Development of processes within teams (both at the team level and at the project level), including the implementation and scaling of AI practices

• Producing: solving complex technical problems on projects, developing solution architecture and ensuring rapid implementation

• Supervising the stability and quality of game software

• Carrying out code review and design review

• Programming and refactoring of game logic

Requirements

• At least 3 years of experience in developing commercial projects in C++ and/or Unity

• Experience in developing projects released in production

• At least one year of experience managing a team of programmers (3+ people)

• An understanding of AI infrastructure and modern tools, and the ability to integrate them into the development process

Nice to have

• Confident knowledge of modern C++ 14/17 standards, as well as STL

• Experience working with popular game engines (Unity, Unreal, Godot, Cocos2D, Defold, etc.)

• Experience developing casual mobile games

How we work with AI:

• AI is an engineering standard on our team, not an option. We use it daily in development—from task decomposition and codebase navigation to writing and refactoring code, etc.

• Our engineers are always responsible for their results. Any generated code goes through the same checks as manually written code: reviews, tests, quality gates, and validation in the context of the product.

• AI empowers our engineers—it doesn't replace them. We expect that with the help of AI, engineers will be able to move through tasks faster, take on a larger volume of work, and solve complex problems more efficiently.

• We share practices that work within the team: good AI use cases, successful approaches, repository rules, and agentic workflows become part of the shared engineering environment.

• We continuously improve our approach. Tools change quickly, so we expect an interest in new AI capabilities and a readiness to suggest improvements if they genuinely increase development speed and quality.

Our stack

• Languages: C++, and Lua and Python for single tasks

• Graphics: OpenGL ES and Metal

• Our own engine, similar to Unity or Unreal, which we are constantly developing read about our engine here

• Advanced CI/CD, automated testing, code review processes and much more

• AI: Claude, Cursor, and Codex with configured repository rules, a growing catalog of specialized skills, and agentic modes for specific tasks. MCP integrations with internal infrastructure (GitHub, Asana, Amplitude, etc.). Agentic workflows cover the entire cycle—from generating game elements and automated tests to automatically creating and reviewing PRs

We offer

• Open communication and transparency in decision making, exchange of experience within teams.

• A focus on code quality and reliability.

• An emphasis on developing each specialist's product ideas Time to play the games that you're developing, so you can envision how this or that feature will work for the user.

• The ability to switch out processes and approaches for more efficient ones without lengthy approvals or bureaucracy.

• Clear opportunities for development into technical director, programming manager or project manager.