Lead Mission Designer Brighton, England, United Kingdom

As a Lead Mission Designer you will lead on the shape of the pacing, gameplay execution and narrative delivery of our core mission content. You will lead and mentor the Mission Design team, driving the design, iteration, and execution of the game's most critical moments. In addition to leading internal team members, you will also oversee and collaborate with external co-development partners, ensuring their work aligns with our creative vision, technical standards, and production goals. Please note we do require someone to be onsite at our Brighton Studio at least 3 days a week.

Duties and Responsibilities

• Design

• Own the high-level mission-flow, structure and pacing for a portion of the game's critical path.
• Partner with the Art and Narrative Leads to ensure a cohesive blend of storytelling, visual direction, and gameplay functionality across all mission beats.
• Drive the implementation and scripting of story-critical gameplay moments, ensuring player clarity and polish.
• Ensure all mission content adheres to established quality bar, pacing guidelines, and difficulty metrics through continuous review and iteration.
• Develop and evangelize best practices for the designers to utilize in their content.
• Analyze, validate and incorporate feedback from the team and external user testing.

• Lead a team of designers to create a significant portion of the game content.
• Foster a collaborative and high-performance culture by empowering the team to take ownership and deliver high-quality work.
• Review, debug, and provide constructive critique on designer-created content, focusing on player experience, performance, and adherence to design guidelines.
• Collaborate with Production to ensure delivery of content on time and to required quality.
• Oversee and direct the workflow of external partners and co-development teams, ensuring their output integrates seamlessly with the internal Mission Design pipeline and meets internal quality standards.
• Provide coaching and mentoring to the team.

Essential Skills, Attributes and Experience

• Helped ship at least one AAA game in Unreal in a Lead Mission Design role or similar.
• Ability to drive prioritization and scheduling of work for the whole department.
• Strong collaboration skills, able to work well with team members from other disciplines and in other locations.
• Proven experience in leadership topics and coaching individuals.

Highly Desirable

• Experience managing outsourced or distributed content teams.
• Strong documentation skills, proficiency with Wiki systems or Confluence is a plus.
• Bachelor's degree, or equivalent experience, in Design or other related discipline.

Hangar 13 prides itself on the diversity of its team members, partners, and communities. For this reason, we remain committed to providing equal employment opportunity in all aspects of the employment relationship, from recruitment and hiring through compensation, benefits, discipline and termination. As an equal opportunity employer, we are also committed to ensuring that qualified individuals with disabilities are provided reasonable accommodation(s) to participate in the job application and/or interview process, to perform their essential job functions, and to receive other benefits and privileges of employment.