Lead Game Designer

🚀 Position: Lead Game Designer – NeoRonin Interactive

📍 Location: Remote Europe

⏰ Contract Type: Full-Time

💰 Salary: Based on experience

We are developing an operational and tactical RTS set in a stylized vision of modern warfare. The focus is on doctrine, intelligence, and reading the opponent rather than micromanaging units. We are looking for a hands-on Lead Game Designer to lead a small design team and turn complex military systems into gameplay that is fun to play and easy to read.

Responsibilities

• Lead and grow the design team: set clear questions to investigate, review the work together, and give and take direct feedback.
• Set short- and long-term design goals for each checkpoint, and prioritize features against them.
• Align design with Art and Programming: turn decisions into clear rules, scoped tasks, and acceptance criteria.
• Run design reviews and playtests, and share the results with the whole team.
• Improve team workflows and tools where they slow the team down.
• Make sure every design decision serves the game's pillars and keeps its fantasy alive.
• Own the core systems, remove dominant strategies and false choices, and hand other systems to team members where that helps the design.
• Prototype rules in collaboration with other departments, tune data, and test through scenarios, replays, and player observation.
• Build spreadsheet models and simple simulations to test pacing, resource limits, and asymmetric balance.
• Design systems for hidden information, playable military realism, and map-driven encounter timing.

Your Role in the Team

You and the Game Director work as partners: the Director sets the vision, and you lead the design team that turns it into decisions and playable systems. The team is small and the project is in early development, with external checkpoints, so setting clear design targets for each checkpoint and running structured playtests are a big part of the job.

Requirements

• 2+ years leading game designers, including delegating systems and reviewing their work
• Experience setting design goals and priorities for a team around external milestones
• Experience working with Art and Programming leads on shared plans and handoffs
• Proven experience in systems design and balancing, including asymmetric balance
• Experience prototyping in an editor and running structured playtests
• Familiarity with strategy, RTS, or wargame design
• Fluent English and experience working remotely and asynchronously

Nice to Have

• Shipped strategy or tactics games, with clear personal ownership of systems
• Familiarity with modern military operations
• Experience designing autonomous unit behavior or advisory systems with explicit information and authority limits

What We Value

• Care for the team: notice when people are stuck or overloaded, and act on it
• Clear communication of direction, decisions, trade-offs, and the reasons behind them
• Willingness to cut features or reduce scope, even when it means letting go of your own ideas
• Evidence over titles: show what you built and how you knew it worked
• Ability to simplify complexity without losing depth

Application Process

There are three interview stages:

1 - Personal Interview. We'll get to know your experience and how you work, and introduce you to NeoRonin and the project.

2 - Technical Interview, in two parts:

With a member of the game design team. We'll discuss your portfolio and explore the design and leadership challenges of the role.

With leads from other departments. We'll talk about how you work with other disciplines and make design decisions other departments can build on.

3 - Final Chat with the Game Director. A short conversation to answer your remaining questions and close the process.

If you'd like to lead our design department, send your portfolio and CV to recruitment@neoronin.co with the subject: “Lead Game Designer”. In your portfolio, show one complex system you created or improved, how your team's work shaped it, and how you knew it worked.

Note: Applications sent via LinkedIn may not be considered.

Join us on this journey and help us create unique and inspiring games! 🚀