Blackbird Interactive is a creative-fueled, future-driven, independent game studio where the best talent in the industry can find long-term careers to help grow their abilities while working on a wide range of projects, which encompass world-class IPs as well as our own creations across multiple genres.
Our studio operates as a remote-first workplace, offering flexible work arrangements.
At this time, we are only able to hire candidates who are legally eligible to work in Canada and reside within Canada.
Renowned for innovative projects and our pioneering four-day work week, we are seeking an experienced Platform Engineer (intermediate or senior) to help build and optimize a visually ambitious title in a proprietary engine. You will work across platform-facing systems with a focus on performance, memory, CPU scheduling, and I/O on modern consoles, including PS5, Xbox Series X|S, and Switch 2.
This role is remote-friendly in Canada (Pacific-time overlap required).
What You’ll Tackle
Own and evolve platform systems in a proprietary engine across PC and consoles, with an emphasis on performance and reliability.Implement and optimize memory systems (allocators, pools, paging/streaming heaps, fragmentation mitigation, lifetime tracking, OOM safety).Build and tune I/O and streaming foundations (async file I/O, decompression pipelines, asset streaming, prioritization, bandwidth/latency hiding, patch-friendly layouts).Improve CPU performance and scalability (job systems, thread scheduling, contention reduction, cache/memory locality, frame-time stability, hitch reduction).Support large-world and content-heavy production with streaming strategy, budgets, and platform constraints (memory, CPU, storage throughput).Integrate and maintain platform SDK-facing code and abstraction layers, ensuring clean boundaries between platform-specific and cross-platform systems.Profile and optimize using platform and internal tooling (CPU sampling, memory trackers, I/O traces, performance capture tools) to identify bottlenecks and regressions.Partner with gameplay, rendering, audio, and content teams to define budgets, best practices, and guardrails that keep builds performant and stable.Contribute to tooling and workflows that improve developer velocity (profiling hooks, telemetry, regression tests, automated reporting, validation checks).Communicate clearly to production and stakeholders on constraints, trade-offs, risk, and roadmap for performance and platform readiness.
You’ll Thrive Here If You…
3+ years of professional game development experience (we are hiring at both intermediate and senior levels; title/level will match experience).Strong modern C++ and systems-level debugging skills (multithreading, performance profiling, low-level investigation).Solid understanding of console constraints and performance fundamentals: CPU architecture, memory hierarchy, cache behavior, and storage/I/O characteristics.Demonstrated experience improving performance, stability, and load-time/frame pacing in a production environment.Comfort collaborating cross-discipline to align content and feature goals with platform budgets (CPU, memory, I/O, build size).Ability to take ownership, deliver maintainable solutions, and contribute constructively to team standards.
Bonus XP
Shipped at least one title on PS5, Xbox Series X|S, and/or Nintendo hardware, especially with platform/performance responsibility.Experience with custom allocators, memory tagging, fragmentation analysis, and crash/telemetry-driven stability improvements.Hands-on experience building streaming and async loading systems, including decompression, on-demand loading, and prioritization strategies.Experience with job systems and frame-time stability work (lock contention, false sharing, task granularity, CPU/GPU sync points).Familiarity with platform profiling workflows (e.g., PIX and equivalent console tooling) and building internal performance diagnostics.Experience creating performance regression detection (benchmarks, automated captures, dashboards) and production-friendly guardrails.