Technical Director, Applied AI

Game Development, R&D & Creative Technology | Remote

Position Overview

Beffio is looking for an experienced Technical Director, Applied AI to define how emerging AI technology can be practically applied across our game development, creative, and technical production workflows.

This is a highly hands-on R&D role sitting between Engineering, Technical Art, Creative Technology, and AI.

We are looking for someone with a strong technical foundation that existed before the current generative AI wave. You may come from software engineering, Technical Art, tools development, procedural systems, creative technology, graphics, or another deeply technical field.

AI should amplify what you were already capable of building, not be the starting point of your technical experience.

Your role will be to continuously explore new AI capabilities, identify where they can create meaningful value for Beffio, build working prototypes, validate them in real production scenarios, and turn successful experiments into workflows and tools that can be used by the wider team.

Key Responsibilities

Applied AI R&D

Research and evaluate emerging AI models, coding agents, frameworks, workflows, and development tools.
Identify practical opportunities for AI across game development, art production, engineering, and internal workflows.
Build prototypes and proof-of-concepts to quickly validate ideas.
Separate genuinely useful technology from short-lived trends and hype.
Turn successful experiments into robust production solutions.

Game Development & Production Integration

Explore and implement AI-assisted workflows across Unity3D, Unreal Engine, Houdini, Blender, and other production tools.
Build AI-powered tools, plugins, integrations, agents, and automation.
Work with Engineering, Technical Art, VFX, Animation, Environment, Character, and Production teams to identify high-value use cases.
Integrate AI into existing pipelines rather than treating it as a separate experimental layer.
Look for opportunities to improve speed, quality, iteration, automation, and creative capability.

Agentic Development & Automation

Explore modern agentic development workflows using tools such as coding agents, custom agents, MCP-based integrations, and multi-agent systems.
Develop workflows that allow developers and artists to automate repetitive or technically complex tasks.
Build internal tools that connect AI systems with existing production environments.
Experiment with new approaches to software development, technical art, validation, documentation, review, and production automation.

AI Enablement

Establish practical standards and best practices for using AI within Beffio.
Document successful workflows so they can be adopted by others.
Run internal workshops and demonstrations for different disciplines.
Help team members move beyond basic prompting toward building their own tools, agents, and AI-assisted workflows.
Communicate complex technology in a clear and practical way.

Requirements

Strong senior-level technical experience in software engineering, Technical Art, tools development, creative technology, procedural systems, game development, or a comparable field.
A proven track record of building real tools, systems, applications, plugins, pipelines, or production technology.
Strong programming skills in one or more languages such as Python, C#, C++, TypeScript, or similar.
Strong practical understanding of modern AI models, APIs, coding agents, automation, and AI-assisted development.
Ability to rapidly prototype ideas and independently evaluate their technical and production value.
Experience taking R&D from early experimentation through to a production-ready solution.
Strong understanding of real-time production and game development workflows.
Experience with tools such as Unity, Unreal Engine, Houdini, Blender, Maya, or comparable environments.
Ability to work directly with both engineers and artists.
Strong communication and presentation skills.
Ability to teach complex technical concepts in a simple and practical way.
High degree of curiosity, ownership, and independent problem solving.
Fluent English.

Nice to Have

Professional game development experience.
Technical Art or creative technology background.
Experience with procedural content generation.
Houdini and procedural workflows.
Experience with graphics, rendering, shaders, or real-time systems.
Experience building custom AI agents or multi-agent workflows.
Experience with LLM APIs, multimodal models, local models, MCP, or similar integration technologies.
Experience developing internal production or developer tools.
Experience with AI-assisted 2D, 3D, animation, VFX, video, or content-production workflows.
Open-source projects, plugins, tools, or personal technical projects.
Experience introducing new technology or workflows into an existing production team.

What We Would Like to See

For this role, we care strongly about proof of work.

We would particularly like to understand two things:

What did you build before the current AI wave?

Show us examples of systems, games, tools, plugins, pipelines, applications, procedural solutions, or other technical work that demonstrates your underlying capabilities.

What are you building with AI today?

Show us work where AI is part of a larger technical solution rather than simply the use of an existing AI interface.

This could include:

AI agents
internal tools
development workflows
automation
integrations
plugins
production pipelines
game-development experiments
multimodal systems
creative technology prototypes

For your strongest examples, we would like to understand:

What problem were you solving?
What did you build?
How did it work?
Which technologies did you use?
What did you learn or change during development?
What was the final impact?

We value demonstrated technical problem solving and working prototypes more than familiarity with a long list of AI products.

Ownership

We are looking for someone who can:

Go from research → prototype → validation → integration → adoption.
Independently investigate technologies where established best practices may not yet exist.
Make pragmatic decisions about which AI technologies are genuinely useful for production.
Build things, not only recommend them.
Work equally comfortably with engineers, Technical Artists, artists, and leadership.
Establish workflows and standards that make the wider team more capable.
Help shape Beffio's long-term approach to applied AI as the role develops.

What We Offer

Significant ownership over how AI is explored and implemented within Beffio.
Direct collaboration with our CTO, Creative Director, Engineers, Technical Artists, Artists, and production teams.
The opportunity to experiment with rapidly evolving technology and apply it to real game-production challenges.
Freedom to prototype new approaches and turn successful ideas into production systems.
A role combining R&D, engineering, game development, and creative technology.
The opportunity to influence workflows across multiple disciplines.
A fully remote international working environment.
Flexible contract options depending on location.
Competitive compensation based on experience and contract structure.
Annual Beffio team retreats.
The opportunity to help shape and potentially grow Beffio's future AI capability.

Technical Director, Applied AI | Game Dev, R&D | Remote