Senior Game Designer

Mob Entertainment is seeking a Senior Game Designer to join the team working on the next entries in the Poppy Playtime franchise. This position is ideal for a hands-on designer with strong gameplay instincts, narrative sensitivity, and experience designing in Unreal Engine.

You’ll be contributing directly to the evolution of Poppy Playtime’s horror-puzzle-adventure formula, helping craft unforgettable moments of tension, exploration, and surprise. You should be comfortable owning features, collaborating across disciplines, and translating ideas into clear, buildable, and compelling gameplay.

This role requires senior-level thinking, from building polished mechanics and interactive sequences to mentoring teammates and identifying ways to raise the floor on overall design quality.

Responsibilities

• Design and own gameplay systems, mechanics, and interactive sequences, with an emphasis on pacing, tension, and player-driven storytelling.
• Translate abstract creative goals into practical, scoped, and implementation-ready design solutions.
• Collaborate with the narrative team to ensure gameplay and story beats are meaningfully integrated.
• Prototype new ideas in Unreal Engine 5 using Blueprints, and help shepherd those designs into full implementation.
• Contribute to the design of puzzles, traversal, environmental interactions, and enemy behavior, depending on the project’s needs.
• Work cross-discipline with Level Designers, Technical Designers, Engineers, and Artists to ensure gameplay is cohesive, performant, and intentional.
• Participate in internal playtests, giving and receiving feedback, and adjusting your designs accordingly.
• Provide mentorship and feedback to other designers as needed, helping uphold the overall creative direction.
• Author and maintain clear documentation to support cross-team understanding and implementation.

Requirements

• 5+ years of professional game design experience, with at least one shipped title in a senior or lead role.
• Expertise in Unreal Engine (Blueprints required; C++ familiarity a plus) for prototyping and light scripting.
• Proven ability to design and balance gameplay systems, puzzles, or scripted interactive moments.
• Experience working on narrative-driven or linear adventure/horror games.
• Strong collaboration and communication skills—able to give and receive feedback and work fluidly across teams.
• Ability to think at both the macro and micro level, balancing creative goals with production realities.
• Self-sufficient, organized, and capable of driving your designs forward with clarity and ownership.

Pluses

• Experience with first-person or exploration-focused gameplay.
• Familiarity with designing for player tension, including scares, suspense, and surprise.
• Strong grasp of environmental storytelling and world-driven narrative.
• Ability to contribute directly to blockouts or greybox levels to demonstrate mechanics.
• Previous mentorship or experience guiding less-experienced designers.

Performance Expectations

• Deliver intuitive, thoughtful, and impactful gameplay designs that align with the vision and tone of the Poppy Playtime universe.
• Drive designs from concept through to final implementation, maintaining clarity across the pipeline.
• Uphold high-quality design standards across your work and support team-wide consistency.
• Adapt quickly to feedback, shifting priorities, or evolving creative direction.

Reporting & Oversight

• Reports to: Design Director & Game Director
• Works closely with: Narrative, Level Design, Technical Design, Engineering, Production
• Communication Tools: Slack, Jira, Confluence, Unreal Engine, Miro

If you’re a senior designer with a passion for building memorable, tension-filled gameplay and want to help shape the future of the Poppy Playtime franchise, we’d love to hear from you.

OUR CORE VALUES:

• Storytelling
• Quality
• Obsession
• Creativity
• Subversion
• Collaboration
• Scrappiness

EMPLOYEE EXPECTATIONS:

• Kindness
• Result-Oriented
• Autonomy
• Efficiency
• Humility
• Be real.
• Be weird.

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