Senior Game Engine Programmer (C++)

SENIOR GAME ENGINE PROGRAMMER (C++)

Auckland | Full Time - 40 hrs a week | Salary Range 100 - 150K Yearly | Enterprise tools team

A bit about us…
RocketWerkz is an ambitious PC video games studio based on Auckland’s waterfront in New Zealand. Founded by Dean Hall, creator of hit survival games DayZ and Icarus, we are independently-run but have the backing of one of the world's largest games companies. We’ve created our own proprietary game development framework called BRUTAL, focusing on scale and performance rather than ease-of-use. Kitten Space Agency is the first game built and published using it. We’ll continue to invest in our existing Unity or Unreal games, but our new games will be made using BRUTAL.

As a Senior Game Engine Programmer you will keep expanding our BRUTAL game development framework. You’ll work closely with both our technical engineering team as well as our game developers to speed up the process of making quality games.

The BRUTAL framework allows programmers to focus on gameplay and game systems in C# while accessing a suite of custom C++ libraries (eg, a Vulkan graphics pipeline, a low-level networking library) via an interop layer for scale, performance and control without the constraints of a game engine. Most of our games are open-world, simulation-based or systems-driven, which benefit from smart data architectures and low-level performance optimizations. We expect we’ll need a wide range of game engine libraries, features and tools so we’re interested to hear what systems you have created in the past.

A day in the life…

Every day at RocketWerkz is different, but here are a few things you can expect to do in your role:

• Create developer-friendly interfaces for custom C++ plugins and in-house libraries

• Build plugins to extend our existing tools and maximise their functionality

• Work closely with the game designers and game programmers to understand their design workflow needs

• Understand and contribute to the project as a whole

• Use C++, JetBrains Rider, Github, Claude Code and task management tools

• Manage your own workload and work hours in consultation with the wider team

• Give feedback to the BRUTAL tools team to continually improve it