Senior Systems Game Designer

AstroNomad Studios is a new, small, distributed game studio backed by AIC. We are building original, expressive games with strong mechanical identity, memorable worlds, and a focus on player discovery, mastery, and adventure. We are looking for a Senior Systems Game Designer to help architect, prototype, tune, and connect the gameplay systems at the heart of our current project, with a particular focus on roguelike/roguelite structure, build variety, progression, and replayability. This is a hands-on senior design role for someone who can think deeply about mechanics, model and tune complex systems, communicate clearly with a small team, and turn abstract gameplay goals into practical, testable, shippable systems. What You’ll Do • Architect, model, and balance interconnected gameplay systems, including combat rules, traversal, abilities, upgrades, encounters, resources, progression, reward economies, and run structure. • Design systems that support roguelike/roguelite replayability, including buildcraft, synergies, risk/reward choices, intra-run progression, meta-progression, procedural variation, and difficulty escalation. • Translate creative direction into clear systemic rules, player verbs, constraints, feedback loops, tuning targets, data structures, and implementation-ready specs. • Work closely with leadership, engineering, level design, animation, art, and production to make sure systems are fun, readable, extensible, and buildable. • Create precise, practical design documentation, tuning tables, state-machine breakdowns, economy models, and balance notes that help the team make decisions and implement features. • Prototype, test, tune, and refine mechanics based on feel, readability, pacing, replayability, systemic depth, and production realities. • Partner with engineers and technical designers to implement and iterate systems in-engine, with Unreal Engine experience especially valuable. • Identify design risks early and help propose focused, achievable solutions that preserve depth without creating unnecessary complexity. • Support the creation of a game that rewards curiosity, mastery, movement, exploration, experimentation, and player discovery.