Careers

Three roles open right now.

No portal, no seventeen-stage funnel. Send an email to a human and you will get an answer either way.

How we work

We run a ten-week season cadence with a hard scope-cut date instead of a crunch week, and we mean it — features that aren't ready go to the next season. Most of the studio works hybrid out of the Austin office two or three days a week; engineering and support roles can be fully remote within the US. Playtests are Wednesday afternoons and everyone plays, including the finance manager, who is genuinely quite good. Interviews are a conversation, a paid or short take-home exercise depending on the role, and a chat with the people you would actually sit next to.

Open roles

Senior Combat Designer

Austin, TX — hybrid

Own the design of heroes and weapons in Riftbound Arena from first grey-box prototype through live balance. You will work directly with the Game Director and a dedicated engineer and animator on each hero.

What you'll do

Prototype new heroes and abilities in Unreal Engine 5 blueprints, and drive them from grey box to shippable with an engineer and an animator.
Own weapon and ability tuning data — spread, falloff, cooldowns, resource curves — and the reasoning behind each value.
Run weekly playtests, gather structured feedback, and turn it into a prioritised change list rather than a vibe.
Read match telemetry and high-ladder VOD alongside our analyst to identify dominant strategies before the community has to tell us.
Write the design half of the seasonal patch notes, in plain language, including the changes people will dislike.

What we're looking for

Five or more years in game design with at least one shipped multiplayer action or shooter title.
Hands-on scripting or blueprint prototyping — you can build the thing, not just describe it.
Comfort defending a design decision with data and then changing your mind when the data changes.
Deep familiarity with competitive shooters as a player, at whatever rank.

To apply, email a CV and a short note about a balance change you'd defend to careers@cindercreststudios.com with the role name in the subject.

Backend Engineer — Matchmaking & Services

Remote (US)

Work on the services behind Riftbound Arena: matchmaking, ranked rating, party and session management, and the telemetry pipeline that everything else depends on.

What you'll do

Extend and operate the matchmaking service — queue shaping, rating convergence, party fairness and regional pool health.
Build and maintain the session and party services that the game client talks to, with an eye on p99 latency, not averages.
Own the match telemetry pipeline that feeds design analytics and the player-trust review tooling.
Take part in a light on-call rotation (roughly one week in six) with real runbooks and no hero culture.
Write the postmortem when something breaks, and the fix that stops it recurring.

What we're looking for

Four or more years building and operating production backend services, ideally Go, Rust or C#.
Practical experience with distributed systems under real-time latency constraints — game services, trading, streaming or similar.
Working knowledge of a cloud platform, container orchestration and infrastructure as code.
Bonus: exposure to matchmaking, rating systems or anti-abuse data work.

To apply, email a CV and a link to something you've built or operated to careers@cindercreststudios.com with the role name in the subject.

Community Manager (Player Trust)

Austin, TX — hybrid

Join the trust team under Marcus Webb. This role sits between the community and the systems that keep ranked honest: reports, appeals, enforcement communication and the anti-cheat programme.

What you'll do

Be the studio's public voice on cheating, reporting and enforcement across our forums, Discord and update posts.
Triage player reports and escalate patterns — not just individual accounts — to the trust and engineering teams.
Help run the ban appeals process with player support, and make sure decisions get explained in plain English.
Track the paid-cheat ecosystem around our games and keep an internal picture of what is being sold and to whom.
Write the recurring trust update: what we banned, what we missed, and what changed.

What we're looking for

Three or more years in community management, player support or trust and safety for a live game.
Excellent written judgement — calm, specific, and able to say "we got this wrong" in public.
Genuine understanding of competitive PC gaming communities and how cheat markets around them work.
Bonus: experience working alongside an anti-cheat vendor or an internal detection team.

To apply, email a CV and a sample community post you're proud of to careers@cindercreststudios.com with the role name in the subject.