Job: Gameplay Engineer (Contract, 3-6 months)
Posted:
Job Title: Gameplay Engineer (Contract, 3-6 months)
Location: Remote, work from home in the US or UK only
Position Type: Full-time (40 hours)
What's the Job?
Uplift Games is the studio behind Adopt Me!, the premier pet adoption game on Roblox (43B+ sessions, 1.94 million record CCU). We're looking for a creative and driven Gameplay Engineer to join our studio. As part of our tight-knit cross-disciplinary team, you will write high quality code, craft polished gameplay experiences, and ship content that delights millions of players.
At Uplift Games, Gameplay Engineers are at the heart of our mission to "Create Future Nostalgia." Your ideas matter here. You'll own features from rough concept to polished product, bringing strong UX intuition and a critical eye for game feel. You care about the details that players remember: a jump that feels satisfying, a pet animation that sparks joy, a VFX flourish that ties a moment together.
This is an opportunity to create an outsized impact on many millions of players while operating in a small studio where every person plays a major role.
You value diversity and want to work alongside talented people from marginalized groups. We are explicitly a trans, LGBTQ+, BIPOC / BAME and disability positive team.
This is a remote position open to candidates who are based in the US or UK and can demonstrate eligibility to work in those countries.
What You'll Be Doing
- Write clean, performant Lua/Luau code for gameplay features, UI, VFX, and content updates.
- Own features end-to-end: concept, implementation, polish, testing, and deployment to millions of players.
- Craft gameplay that feels great. Responsive controls, polished and effective feedback, intuitive UX. As a gameplay engineer your ability to deliver a satisfying player experience is crucial.
- Be a creative generalist. You'll work across code, particles, asset integration, UI layout, camera work, and more. We value breadth. Being excited about learning and working with new systems is excellent. Specializing in one or two deep areas is an added bonus.
- Collaborate with your cross-disciplinary peers (artists, QA testers, producers, game designers). Communicate clearly and empathetically both synchronously and asynchronously.
- Participate in the design process. Brainstorm, pitch ideas, and help shape what we build. Engineers here have a real voice in game design.
- Be a team player: help teammates solve problems, give and receive thoughtful code reviews, document features, fix bugs, and clean up old code.
- Work with producers to scope your work, assess risk, set goals, and ensure timely delivery.
- Review your own work critically before marking it complete. Thoroughly test throughout development and take pride in shipping with minimal bugs.
Your Background
These are the things candidates really should have but can make up for in other areas. If you're missing one or two, consider applying anyway, especially if you belong to a marginalized group.
- 1+ years of professional or significant independent game development experience.
- Roblox/Luau experience, or traditional game development experience with hands-on work in areas like character controllers, camera systems, creature behavior, motion/animation, or VFX.
- A portfolio or shipped work that demonstrates your game feel and creative skills. We want to see what you've built. Please highlight your specific contributions.
- Creativity and a good eye for design. You notice when something doesn't feel right and you fix it.
- Comfortable reading and navigating a large existing codebase. You can orient yourself in unfamiliar code and build on top of it.
- Comfortable working across disciplines. You're happy jumping from code to particles to UI layout.
- Strong problem solving skills and a proactive self-starter attitude.
- Good written and verbal communication in English.
- Passion for playing and making games.
- You value diversity and want to work alongside talented people from marginalised groups. We are explicitly a trans, LGBTQ+, BIPOC / BAME and disability positive team.
Bonus Points
These are things that can improve your candidacy, but none of these are necessary to apply.
- A game or experience you designed and built yourself (indie game, Roblox experience, game jam entry, etc).
- Extra bonus if you have released and maintained a Roblox experience.
- Understanding of the Roblox community and Roblox player motivations.
- Experience working in self-managed roles and remote teams.
- Awareness of client-server security in multiplayer games.
- Experience with REST APIs and modern UI frameworks in Roblox (e.g. React-Lua).
- Breadth across secondary game development skills: UI/UX, game design, graphic design, audio design, VFX, modeling + texturing, etc.
Requested Supplementary Documents
- A copy of your CV / Resume.
- Portfolio: Examples of your past work that demonstrate your technical and creative skills. Video samples, shipped titles, or playable links are strongly encouraged. Please describe your specific contributions.
- Optional Cover Letter: A brief overview of why you want to work at Uplift Games.
- Optional Code Samples: One or more samples of your code (files or web links like Github are both fine).
What's the Compensation?
When possible, we provide transparent estimated salary ranges to set expectations early and to respect your time.
We recognize, however, that salaries vary within our various remote geographical locations. To give an indication of the salary level for this role, we estimate the annual salary to be a range of:
- $60,000 - $110,000 USD
- £40,000 - £65,000 GBP
Our compensation package is intended to be competitive with your local market and is negotiable.
We also offer a competitive benefits package for our employees.
I'm ready to apply.
A few reminders: you must be over 18 to apply. Though this is a remote role, you must reside in and have permission to work in either the US or UK to apply.
We're really looking forward to reading your application. Apply for this job on Homerun below!