Staff Gameplay Designer

About the role

The role creates a new multiplayer action game for teamLFG. It focuses on avatar movement, core sandbox systems, and expressive social spaces. The role collaborates with a cross-disciplinary design team to turn a creative vision into a PlayStation franchise.

Designers shape how products look and feel. Designers create user flows, wireframes, prototypes, and polished visuals. They test ideas with users and iterate on feedback. Design work spans research, interaction design, and visual design. Collaboration with product and engineering happens daily. Design decisions are judged by outcomes such as usability, conversion, and customer satisfaction. Most design teams keep a living design system to keep products consistent.

Key facts

What you'll do

Well-designed NPCs strengthen IP quality and consistency and reinforce sandbox design principles.

Requirements

An intuitive and expressive action sandbox allows modern multiplayer social games to create memories between players.

Collaboration with designers, artists, programmers, audio professionals, quality assurance, and producers achieves shared goals in a flexible work environment.

Broad T-shaped rapid prototyping skills quickly stub out gameplay ideas to evaluate their potential across disciplines.

Strong technical scripting skills and thoughtful game design tools unlock player expression, content variety, and execution speed.

Deep understanding of character motion and animation, including momentum and timing, shapes player communication and tone.

Contributors align around product decisions and own feature direction without sacrificing empathy and collaboration.

Operating autonomously and giving or receiving feedback handles ambiguity, even when contexts are unclear.

Creating and evaluating plans meets the experiential needs of players and market demands.

Outstanding oral and written communication skills ensure clarity of ideas and feedback.

Systemically consistent, combinatoric game design creates player surprise and laughter.

Nice to have

Staff Sandbox or Gameplay Designer experience on AAA or large-scale online action games includes designing, documenting, and building character customization systems.

Delegating work or ownership to multi-disciplinary peers is part of the experience.

Social and cooperative game design and balancing for an active player base is required.

Practical notes

This contract role is based in the United States with remote eligibility.

The position reports to the Design Team and partners closely with audio, effects, animation, and QA.

Typical interview steps

Design interviews usually include a portfolio review, a design exercise, and a team conversation. Candidates present past work and explain their process and decisions. Some loops include a live design challenge. Communication matters as much as the visual output. Portfolios are strongest when they show the problem, the constraints, and the iteration, not just the final screens. Interviewers also watch how you take feedback.

Good to know

Work in this field centers on designing systemic interactions that create memorable social moments.

Action sandbox design connects player intention, responsive controls, and expressive communication.

Success depends on tight collaboration across disciplines and comfort with autonomous decision-making.

Systems thinking helps balance character motion, animation, and emergent player behavior.

Clear written and verbal communication ensures shared understanding across remote teams.

Questions to ask

Useful questions for the interview: what a typical week looks like, how work is assigned, what tools the team uses, and how feedback works. Asking how the role has changed recently and what the team wishes it had known when joining is also reasonable. Questions about the manager's priorities are especially valued.

Career growth

Design careers grow from junior to senior, staff, and principal levels. Some designers move into design management or design operations. Specializations include UX research, interaction design, and brand design. Cross-functional influence grows with seniority. Senior designers are expected to influence product strategy, not just execute visuals. Building a habit of user research strengthens any design career.