Senior Systems Designer, Progression

About the role

You will craft meaningful goals for players that build their exposure, experience, and mastery of new and existing game mechanics, all while immersing them in the world of Fortnite. You will spearhead innovation in design for the engagement space, including systems, progression, and rewards, fulfilling key engagement metrics and supporting broad systematic framework needs. You will communicate and represent a vision for the player's experience to multiple teams across the company, as well as supporting teams of all crafts to optimize their engagement. You will collaborate with product management and marketing teams to ensure player satisfaction and overall game health while driving growth across the ecosystem and supporting key activations. You will drive collaborative and iterative live design to prototype quickly, make changes live soon after, learn from them, and iterate.

Key facts

What you'll do

Define and own high-level engagement challenges across the Fortnite ecosystem, innovating existing systems like Quests and Passes and creating entirely new structures to guide the player experience.

Translate strategic design frameworks into concrete goals that build player exposure, experience, and mastery while reinforcing the broader systematic framework needs of the engagement space.

Represent the player vision to multiple cross-disciplinary teams, ensuring alignment on engagement objectives and supporting collaborators across all crafts to optimize outcomes.

Partner with product management and marketing teams to safeguard player satisfaction and game health, driving ecosystem growth and enabling key activations through data-informed design decisions.

Lead iterative live design cycles, rapidly prototyping solutions, implementing changes in live environments, analyzing results, and refining designs based on observed player behavior.

Champion empathy for player motivations, designing goal-setting structures that positively influence play styles and deepen long-term engagement within BR environments.

Maintain a strong interest in Battle Royale mechanics and the Fortnite ecosystem, ensuring designs resonate with the core audience and support sustainable retention.

React quickly to shifting project requirements, driving decisions with clarity and owning the vision through execution in a fast-paced live-service context.

Apply a solutions-focused mindset to balance creative ambition with technical and operational constraints, ensuring feasible and scalable progression systems.

Champion continuous improvement by learning from live metrics, player feedback, and cross-team insights to evolve systems over time.

Requirements

You must possess a minimum of 10 years of experience shipping multiple titles as a game designer, with a focus on engagement content or goal-based progression systems in live-service multiplayer environments.

You demonstrate a talent for empathizing with players and a deep understanding of player motivations, forms of play, and the effects of goal setting on play.

You have a strong interest in BR and the Fortnite ecosystem, including an understanding of what makes these experiences compelling and sustainable.

You are able to react quickly to changing project needs and drive decisions, then own that vision from conception through execution.

You are player-focused, passionate, solutions-focused, and innovative, traits that define success at Epic and influence every aspect of how work is executed.

You thrive in collaborative environments, working closely with engineers, artists, producers, and other disciplines to achieve shared engagement objectives.

You communicate clearly and persuasively, balancing data, design principles, and creative intuition to influence stakeholders at all levels.

You are comfortable operating in a fast-paced, live-service context where iterative design and rapid experimentation are essential.

Practical notes

You must be authorized to work in the United States without sponsorship, and no work authorization sponsorship will be provided for this role.

Hours are standard professional hours in the Cary, North Carolina office.

Travel is not expected for this role.

Visa sponsorship is not available for this position.

This position is not eligible for relocation assistance.

The employment start date is contingent upon business needs.

Candidates must submit work samples as part of the application review process.

This role is not eligible for sign-on or retention bonuses.