Three open roles

Work with us

We hire slowly and we do not backfill for the sake of it. If one of these is genuinely your job, we would like to hear from you.

How we work

We run four-day sprints with a review on Thursday afternoon, and we do not crunch — if a season is not ready, the season moves, and that has happened twice. The working language is English; roughly half the studio speaks Portuguese day to day, and nobody is expected to learn it. Lisbon staff are in the office two or three days a week and pick which ones. Everyone gets the last Friday of the month for their own work, shipped or not.

Open roles

Backend Engineer — Matchmaking & Regions

Remote (Europe / UTC-1 to UTC+3) · Permanent

Skybreak Royale runs dedicated servers in three regions. You would own the matchmaking service that fills 60-player lobbies across them without leaving anyone in a queue for four minutes at 2 a.m.

Responsibilities

Own the matchmaking service end to end: queue logic, skill bucketing, party handling and region selection.
Keep per-region fill times and session hand-off healthy, and improve them where the data says we can.
Work with the live ops producer on season launch capacity planning and rollback plans.
Extend our match telemetry so designers can answer their own questions without asking engineering.
Take part in the on-call rotation (one week in five, Lisbon business hours weighted).

Requirements

Three or more years building and operating networked backend services in production.
Strong Go, C# or Rust, and comfort with containers and infrastructure-as-code.
Experience with multi-region deployments and the latency trade-offs they force.
Able to overlap at least four hours a day with Lisbon time.

To apply, email careers@paperlightgames.com with a CV and a short note about a system you have operated, not just built.

Technical Artist (Stylised Rendering)

Lisbon — hybrid · Permanent

Our paper look is held together by shaders, a custom lighting rig and a lot of Joana's rules about how paper edges catch light. You would keep it looking right while it runs at 60 fps on a GTX 1050 Ti.

Responsibilities

Own and extend the stylised shader library for both titles in Unity's render pipeline.
Profile and optimise on our low-spec test machines, and keep a written performance budget per scene.
Build and maintain the art team's tooling — import checks, material validation, palette enforcement.
Prototype season-specific effects (weather, water, glider trails) with the art director.

Requirements

Shipped at least one title where you owned a non-photoreal look in Unity or a comparable engine.
Fluent in HLSL or a node-based shader authoring workflow, and able to read a GPU frame capture.
Comfortable being the bridge between artists and engineers, in writing as well as in person.

To apply, email careers@paperlightgames.com with a portfolio or reel and a note on one look you are proud of.

Live Ops Producer

Lisbon — hybrid · Permanent (12-month parental cover, with intent to extend)

Seasons land roughly every ten weeks. This role keeps that calendar realistic and keeps the studio from promising things on a stream that engineering has not scoped.

Responsibilities

Own the seasonal calendar for Skybreak Royale: scope, milestones, launch day runbook and post-launch review.
Coordinate patch content across design, art, engineering and player support.
Run the charity and community events end to end, including the partner side.
Write the patch notes, or at least make sure someone does before the build is live.
Track post-season metrics and bring an honest read of them to the studio review.

Requirements

Two or more years producing live content on a released game, ideally free-to-play.
Confident saying "not this season" to people more senior than you.
Based in or willing to relocate to the Lisbon area; we help with the paperwork.

To apply, email careers@paperlightgames.com with a CV and one example of a launch that went wrong and what you changed afterwards.

We read everything and reply either way, usually within two weeks. There is no application form and no automated screening — a real person on the team opens the mail.