Top Tech Jobs & Startup Jobs in Chicago, IL

Leads UX research for a AAA game title, defining research goals, test plans, surveys, and session formats. Conducts and moderates qualitative and quantitative studies, including playtests, focus groups, interviews, RITE, A/B testing, and narrative testing. Presents findings through reports, dashboards, and stakeholder presentations to guide development decisions. Collaborates with development teams, analysts, recruitment agencies, and external research partners, while advocating for accessibility and mentoring junior researchers.

Designs, prototypes, implements, balances, and polishes enemy AI, mini-bosses, and boss encounters. Collaborates with gameplay programmers, animators, mission designers, and combat teams in a cross-disciplinary pod. Documents gameplay systems, incorporates feedback, supports mission design through training and model encounters, and contributes to game-wide combat quality, difficulty, differentiation, and playability.

Leads the creative vision, design, prototyping, implementation, tuning, and polish of playable hero characters across combat, traversal, controls, camera, abilities, and progression. Collaborates with programmers, animators, artists, narrative, mission, and systems teams to deliver high-quality third-person gameplay. Owns character design standards, mentors designers, drives innovation in development tools, coordinates milestones, and ensures consistent quality across the project and studio.

Creates and implements real-time visual effects for gameplay, environments, and cinematics. Responsibilities include particle effects, textures, shaders, geometry, UV sets, simulations, and FX event timing. The role optimizes effects for performance, collaborates with game development teams on engine implementation, and supports the game’s overall art style. Proficiency in Maya and Photoshop, knowledge of shader networks, animation, timing, and computer graphics fundamentals are required.

Leads a Systems Design team while contributing hands-on gameplay systems design for a large-scale game. Responsibilities include managing and mentoring designers, prototyping and implementing gameplay systems, documenting features, coordinating schedules and milestones, reviewing work, maintaining design standards, and collaborating with programming, production, and creative leadership to deliver high-quality game experiences.

Develop and maintain scalable gameplay systems focused on enemy, boss, and ally behaviors for AAA games. Collaborate with content and engineering teams, architect flexible features, optimize performance, review code, mentor junior programmers, estimate work, and drive architecture development for enemy behavior systems.

Administer and stabilize the studio Flow Production Tracking environment and Flow/Jira Bridge; re-architect automation/event listeners, ensure data integrity, deploy reliable services, troubleshoot integrations, document configurations and recovery, configure schemas/permissions, build dashboards/reports, and support vendor workflows across production pipelines.