About the company
This position is listed on behalf of a partner company, who manages all applications and next steps. Our partner is looking for a Senior Generalist Engineer (Video Games) based in United States.
Responsibilities
- Own the complete lifecycle of emulators and supporting tools, including development, maintenance, optimization, and ongoing expansion.
- Develop and maintain CI/CD pipelines, update development machines and tools, and create and monitor automation scripts.
- Optimize emulated games and supporting software for performance, stability, and compatibility across target platforms.
- Lead the end-to-end debugging and resolution of platform compatibility issues.
- Drive reverse engineering efforts for classic games, including debugging, patching, media replacement, achievements and trophies, and other modern enhancements.
- Develop and maintain technical tools that improve engineering and production workflows.
- Analyze and resolve complex software, hardware, memory, threading, and platform-level issues.
- Contribute to architectural decisions, engineering best practices, and improvements to development processes.
- Provide technical mentorship and guidance to other engineers.
- Collaborate closely with engineering, production, and QA teams to identify issues, evaluate solutions, and deliver high-quality player experiences.
Requirements
- 5–8 years of generalist software engineering experience, with a strong interest or professional background in video game development.
- Excellent C and C++ programming skills with a deep understanding of computer architecture, including CPU/GPU behavior, memory management, threading, and SIMD techniques.
- Strong scripting skills in languages such as Python, Lua, or similar.
- Experience developing, debugging, and optimizing software across multiple platforms.
- Experience with static recompilation techniques.
- Hands-on experience with reverse engineering and debugging tools such as Ghidra.
- Ability to diagnose complex technical problems and work independently toward practical solutions.
- Strong communication skills and the ability to collaborate effectively within a distributed remote team.
- Proactive mindset with the ability to take ownership of challenging engineering problems.
- Genuine enthusiasm for classic video games, retro gaming, and emulation.
- Experience with game emulation, cross-platform ports, or open-source projects such as libretro is a strong advantage.
- Familiarity with assembly languages including x86, ARM, or MIPS is beneficial.
- Experience with binary analysis and modifying or patching classic games is a plus.
- Understanding of modern GPU rendering technologies such as DirectX 12, Metal, or Vulkan is desirable.
Conditions
- Target compensation of $110,000–$130,000 annually.
- Fully remote position for U.S.-based professionals.
- Opportunity to work on the preservation and modernization of classic video games.
- Hands-on work across emulation, reverse engineering, systems programming, and cross-platform development.
- Opportunity to contribute to tools and technologies supporting a diverse portfolio of retro games.
- Collaboration with experienced engineers, producers, and QA professionals.
- Technical ownership across emulator development, platform compatibility, performance, and tooling.
- Opportunity to influence engineering practices and mentor other technical team members.
- Work on projects that bring classic games to modern audiences and hardware.