Software Engineer Austin, Texas

At 2K, we create some of the most iconic and culture-shaping video games in entertainment, including NBA® 2K, one of the top-selling franchises in the world, and legendary titles like Bio Shock®, Borderlands®, Mafia, Sid Meier’s Civilization®, and XCOM®, as well as fan favorites WWE® 2K, Top Spin®, and PGA TOUR® 2K. We build unforgettable experiences by pushing the boundaries of creativity, authenticity and innovation across every genre.

Our portfolio is brought to life by some of the most influential game development studios in the world. Visual Concepts, Firaxis Games, Hangar 13, Cat Daddy Games, 31st Union, Cloud Chamber, Gearbox, HB Studios, and 2K Sports Lab create world-class experiences across platforms. But what truly powers 2K is our people. We believe the best ideas come from teams that feel empowered, supported, and inspired.

As an equal opportunity employer, we are committed to fostering a diverse, inclusive workplace where people are encouraged to come as they are and do their best work.

This is an individual contributor role. You will not have direct reports, but you will own technical decisions for the SDK portfolio 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.

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.

Ensure architectural consistency across language and engine variants so every studio gets a predictable, coherent developer experience regardless of which SDK they pick up.

Stay hands‑on. Write production code, prototype the hard problems first, lead the toughest implementations, and be a consistent presence in code review.

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.

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.

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.

Build AI‑assisted tooling that scales the SDK team’s impact—whether that’s code generation pipelines, automated review assistants, intelligent search over our SDK surface area, or anything else that compounds team output.

Partner with engineering managers on technical strategy, hiring, and team growth without owning people management yourself.

Work directly with studio engineering leads to understand how our SDKs are actually used in production and feed those learnings back into the roadmap.

Mentor engineers on the team—raise the technical ceiling without becoming a bottleneck.

Represent the SDK team in cross‑functional technical discussions across the Technology group and the studios.

8+ years of software engineering experience, with significant time spent designing and shipping SDKs, libraries, tools, or platform APIs that other engineers depend on.

Hands‑on experience with Unreal and / or Unity, including how engines integrate with external native libraries.

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.

Hands‑on experience working with LLM tools (Claude, ChatGPT, Git Hub 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…