Staff Software Engineer

About this role

<h1><strong>Who We Are</strong></h1> <p>2K publishes some of the most popular video game franchises on the planet including Mafia, Borderlands, BioShock, NBA 2K, WWE 2K, Evolve, XCOM, and Sid Meier’s Civilization.</p> <p>The 2K Tech group is responsible for identifying common problems across the company and building solutions to those problems. We fill our team with individuals who enjoy a challenge, enjoy working in a fast-paced environment, and want to take ownership and responsibility for products. If you are passionate about working in the game industry and implementing cool features for our game products, come join our team.</p> <h1><strong>About the Role</strong></h1> <p>We’re looking for a Staff Software Engineer to be the senior technical voice across our family of cross-platform, cross-language SDKs. Our tooling ships in nearly every game 2K publishes, with first-class support across Unreal, Unity, native C++, Go, JavaScript, and more—and we need someone who can hold the architectural picture across all of them.</p> <p>This is an individual contributor role. You will not have direct reports, but you will own technical decisions for the SDK and Cloud verticals and partner closely with engineering managers on direction, hiring, and team growth. We expect you to spend roughly half your time writing code and half your time setting technical direction—reviewing designs, raising the quality bar, and unblocking other engineers.</p> <p>Your most important job on day one is driving architectural consistency across our language and engine variants. The Unreal, Unity, native C++, Go, and JavaScript SDKs should all feel like they came from the same team and uphold the same standards for API design, versioning, performance, and reliability.</p> <p>This role is AI-first. You’ll leverage large language models and AI-powered tooling as a core part of how you work—whether that’s prototyping API designs, generating cross-language bindings, drafting RFCs, exploring refactors, or building tooling that scales the team’s output. We expect you to push the boundaries of what’s possible when AI is embedded into every aspect of senior engineering work.</p> <h1><strong>What You Will Do</strong></h1> <ul> <li>Drive technical decisions across the SDK and Cloud verticals set by the Director and through collaboration with the team. Defend the architectural direction for how our tools are designed, layered, versioned, and evolved across Unreal, Unity, native C++, Go, JavaScript, and other targets.</li> <li>Ensure architectural consistency across language and engine variants so every studio gets a predictable, coherent developer experience regardless of which SDK or API they pick up.</li> <li>Stay hands-on. Write production code, prototype the hard problems first, lead the toughest implementations, and be a consistent presence in code review.</li> <li>A natural collaborator who leads through influence rather than authority—able to build trust across teams, bring people along on technical decisions, and elevate the engineers around you through empathy and clear communication.</li> <li>Define and uphold the bar for API design, documentation, backward compatibility, performance, and reliability—and make those standards legible to the rest of the team.</li> <li>Use LLMs and AI-powered workflows daily to accelerate your work: prototyping designs, generating boilerplate across languages, exploring refactors, drafting technical proposals, and automating repetitive engineering tasks.</li> <li>Build AI-assisted tooling that scales the each team’s impact—whether that’s code generation pipelines, automated review assistants, intelligent search over our platform’s surface area, or anything else that compounds team output.</li> <li>Partner with engineering managers on technical strategy, hiring, and team growth without owning people management yourself.</li> <li>Work directly with studio engineering leads to understanding how our tools are actually used in production and feeds those learnings back into the roadmap.</li> <li>Mentor engineers on the team—raise the technical ceiling without becoming a bottleneck.</li> <li>Represent the SDK and Cloud verticals team in cross-functional technical discussions across the Technology group and the studios.</li> </ul> <h1><strong>What You Bring</strong></h1> <ul> <li>10+ years of software engineering experience, with significant time spent designing and shipping SDKs, libraries, tools, and platform APIs that other engineers depend on.</li> <li>Fluency in C++ and at least one of C# (Unity), Go, or JavaScript / TypeScript—and the ability to ramp quickly on the others. You don’t need to be an expert in every language we ship; you do need to be the person who can hold the architectural picture across all of them.</li> <li>Hands-on experience with Unreal and / or Unity, including how engines integrate with external native libraries.</li> <li>Strong instincts around API design, versioning, deprecation, and backward compatibility—you’ve felt the pain of getting these wrong and know how to avoid it.</li> <li>Hands-on experience working with LLM tools (Claude, ChatGPT, GitHub Copilot, Cursor, or similar) as part of your daily engineering workflow—not just experimentation, but real productivity gains and a point of view on where AI fits and where it doesn’t.</li> <li>Comfortable being the technical decision-maker. You can hold a strong opinion, defend it with evidence, and change it when the evidence shifts.</li> <li>A clear, generous communicator. You write design docs people actually read, give code review feedback that lifts the team, and can explain trade-offs to non-engineers.</li> <li>Track record of working effectively across teams without formal authority.</li> </ul> <h1><strong>Bonus Items</strong></h1> <ul> <li>Experience shipping developer tools or platforms in the games industry.</li> <li>Prior experience shipping software on console platforms (PlayStation, Xbox, Nintendo Switch), i