Lead Gameplay Developer

At Couch Heroes, we’re exploring new ground for the MMO genre. In a world where fantasy and ancient technology intertwine, players explore shattered realms, grapple across verticality, solve puzzles, and push back corruption, with progression driven by player expression and discovery. We envision bridging generations of gamers, creating a space where both coexist and journey together. We’re developing in Unreal Engine, in early production, with a team spanning multiple countries.

We’re remote-first, based in the UK, and scaling to support a multi-year live-service roadmap. We value autonomy, curiosity, and collaborative ownership, and we’re looking for creators who want to help build something from the ground up. Sound like your kind of thing? We should talk.

The systems that define how players interact with the world, each other, and the game’s core mechanics are built by gameplay engineers. We need a Lead Gameplay Developer who can own the technical implementation of our core gameplay systems and build the engineering team that delivers them.

You will report to the CTO and manage a growing team of gameplay engineers. You will make technical design decisions, stay hands‑on with implementation, and represent the gameplay engineering discipline across the studio in production planning, design reviews, and resourcing decisions.

We are in early production. The studio has been running for three years, but core gameplay systems including combat, traversal, abilities, progression, and multiplayer interaction are still being architected and prototyped. You will be making foundational technical decisions that define how the game feels, scales, and evolves over years of live service.

• Manage a growing team of gameplay engineers as the team scales through production: set priorities, assign work, balance workload, and run regular 1:1s focused on progress, career development, and honest feedback.
• Lead performance reviews and goal setting aligned to production milestones and individual development plans. Identify skill gaps and address them through coaching, stretch assignments, or training.
• Represent the gameplay engineering discipline in cross‑discipline leads meetings, production planning, and resourcing conversations. Advocate for team needs and capacity.
• Foster a team culture of technical rigour, clean code practices, and collaborative problem solving.
• Support hiring as the team grows: contribute to job descriptions, design technical assessments, and participate in interview loops.

• Own the technical design and implementation of core gameplay systems in Unreal Engine 5, including combat, traversal, abilities, player interaction, and progression mechanics.
• Architect gameplay systems for a persistent MMO context: server‑authoritative logic, client prediction, ability replication, and state synchronisation across distributed server infrastructure.
• Collaborate closely with game design and level design to translate design intent into robust, tuneable, and extensible gameplay code. Build systems that designers can iterate on without requiring engineering support for every change.
• Stay hands‑on with C++ and Blueprint implementation. Build, profile, and iterate alongside your engineers, establishing technical quality benchmarks and code architecture patterns.
• Work with animation, VFX, and audio teams to integrate gameplay systems with presentation layers: ability visuals, hit feedback, audio cues, and UI responses.

• Define coding standards, architecture patterns, and review processes for gameplay code. Ensure the codebase remains maintainable and extensible as the team and feature set grow.
• Profile and optimise gameplay systems for MMO‑scale performance: tick budgets, replication bandwidth, ability processing in dense combat scenarios, and memory management.
• Collaborate with online services and network engineering to ensure gameplay systems work reliably under real‑world latency and server load conditions.
• Work with production to manage scope, schedules, and task breakdowns for gameplay…