Principal Programmer

Enjoy applying your skills to a wide array of features? Do you have the initiative and experience to steer your project towards success? Looking for autonomy in a focused development environment?

Why Goose Byte

Do you wish that you could spend your work hours actually making games? We're offering that low-overhead-indie-team-productivity along with all of the stability and I-can-sleep-at-night big studio perks.

We're cultivating an inclusive, high performance, talent dense team where collaboration is key and we won't be tolerating talented jerks. High integrity is important and we nurture an environment built around the concepts of freedom, inclusivity, respect, sustainability, and trust.

You might currently, or have previously held, one of these titles: Lead Programmer, Technical Lead, Technical Director, or perhaps had a long stint as a talented Senior Programmer. At Goose Byte the Principal Programmer role is focused primarily on developing video games! Their time will be spent directly programming features, but we will also be relying heavily on their technical and team leadership skills to steer our project towards success.

This role will be a key knowledge-holder and decision-maker for the critical features and pipelines on the project. The Principal Programmer will be trusted to be the driving force behind the biggest technological advancements and innovations needed to execute on the vision. Goose Byte operates with very thin boundaries between disciplines, so this role gives the opportunity to be a peer and a mentor to all of our individual contributors - the talents of a principal programmer are not bound to just the tech team!

As Goose Byte will remain a small team, this role will be exposed to sensitive and critical project discussions. We’d appreciate another technical leader to add a voice and point of view to project planning and scoping choices needed to keep our studio operating in a healthy manner.

Our First Project

For our first project we’re making an open world survival crafting game that focuses on exploration and creativity over violence and combat, finding a unique space in a crowded genre to bring something exciting and different to players.

We’re creating our own IP, building on our love of science fiction, worldbuilding, and unconventional games, and as an indie studio we have full creative freedom and control.

Using our experience from leading AAA open world and action adventure games we’re thinking practically and pragmatically about our choices, from technology, to scope of features, and where to place our bets for quality and innovation.

There are lots of challenges ahead but we are setting our own ambitions and expectations, leveraging our scale to be decisive, move quickly, and make the game better every day.

Your Opportunities

You are definitely a match if you are excited by these opportunities…

• Focus on game dev, first and foremost. Always know the next three tasks you want to tackle
• Assure the quality of your work is consistent week by week
• When approaching your work, put yourself in the shoes of a designer, a programmer, an artist, and the player to better understand how your work will be used
• You will be given ownership over your choice of the projects’ most critical features sets
• Extremely autonomous, given the space to take time to research and innovate, no red tape in sight
• Execute on strategies that consider multi-project use cases, while covering all the current projects’ needs
• Work alongside the dev team as a peer, but also find ways to mentor and nurture your team, across all departments
• You’ll be trusted to give feedback and to challenge the studio’s long term technical direction
• The success, innovation and hard skills of the principal programmer will heavily influence future projects at the company
• Find a rewarding balance of work and life, using the freedom and control given to you to make smart choices about how your time is invested into the project
• Create MVPs for the wider team to expand upon, working smart and fast to find the fun in the game

Values

Each colleague that joins our studio is equally important to its success. As such, all of our benefits are available to everyone, effective from their first day with us. Being transparent about this equality and how we value our employees is a key part of who we are.  

Freedom

• Hybrid Remote work - we primarily work from home with provided high-end hardware and collaboration tools. We meet once a week in our Montreal office for collaborative work and socializing.
• Flexible schedule
• $1,000 yearly employee lifestyle fund - use this to stay healthy, social, comfortable or productive

Inclusivity 

• Equal opportunity and equal pay employer
• Team building and social events in Montreal
• Zero tolerance policy on harassment, bullying and discrimination
• No talented jerks

Respect

• Competitive base salaries for all jobs
• Low admin and manager overhead - No boring reccurring meetings
• An uncapped profitability bonus scheme that shares studio profits with everyone
• We offer everyone dedicated high end hardware to maximise productivity

Sustainability

• Commitment to a Crunch-free environment
• Competitive Group Insurance Plan (Healthcare, Vision, Dental, Life Insurance)
• Retirement fund - We match 50% of all employee RRSP contributions
• Studio shuts down one week for Winter Holidays

Trust

• Unlimited paid vacation for all employees - this means 5 weeks minimum
• Unlimited sick days / Family days / Flexi days
• All benefits start day one, for all employees

Get On Our Radar

We value diverse backgrounds and fresh perspectives. We hire based on future potential, not only your past experiences.

We’re looking to speak with seasoned programmers whose main motivation is being hands-on with game development. You should still have a strong passion for programming, and for working with a team of individual contributors as peers. You are on a technical lead or lead programmer level, or even higher, and have relevant experiences shipping games and solving an array of technical challenges.

You should possess a well-rounded skill set without the need for mentorship, yet you also enjoy mentoring others. We’d really like to speak to people who can expand on our skills in system architecture, and who can keep a team iterating without collecting a critical amount of technical debt.

The main technologies we use at the moment are:

• Unreal Engine 5
• GitHub
• Google Workspace

If you already have skills here it's a great bonus! 

So...

If you made it here and this sounds like a great fit for you, then what are you waiting for!