Job Description

WB Games Central Technology and WB Games Montreal, a division of Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment (WBIE), are seeking a Principal Programmer, Rendering with extensive rendering and special effects experience to join our talented team working on unannounced AAA console titles.

As a member of the central team, you will collaborate with designers, artists, and technology leads at several WB Games studios to develop immersive gameplay experiences with industry leading visuals.  Specifically, you will be working to support a talented team of expert engineers that are building a vision for future games at WB and will be partnered directly with games in development, including projects at Avalanche Software.

Your New Role…

In this role, you will set technical direction for a programming team to develop, maintain, and optimize cross-platform systems and tools directly related to game rendering. You will coordinate and plan support to other departments to ensure continuous debugging of issues. You will also be responsible for prioritizing tasks, roadmaps by working with production and ensuring that the team understands and meets expectations for assigned tasks within established deadlines. You will play a key role in solving problems or situations that impact your team and projects. You will ensure that the technical documentation related to the development of the team is complete and up to date.

Your responsibilities include the design, authoring, maintenance, and refactoring of visual and effects systems that meet all design, technical and schedule requirements. You will collaborate with technical leadership and other engineers to help establish overall technical design and architecture. You will work in concert with designers and content creators to engineer solutions that satisfy design and content requirements. You will partner with the production staff in building and maintaining realistic schedules, identifying dependencies and raising red-flags where appropriate. You will work closely with QA and technical leadership to ensure the stability and accuracy of code and authoring systems by identifying, communicating, and resolving defects.

Your Role Accountabilities...

• Set technical direction and manage the rendering programming team in the development of new systems, features, tools, and take advantage of the latest technologies while maintaining a stable code base.
• Work closely with management, other department leadership and production to develop programming timelines and objectives.
• Participate in the recruitment of members of the rendered programming team.
• Implement, optimize, and maintain rendering features in collaboration with artists and research and design managers.
• Optimize systems: central processing unit (CPU), graphics processing unit (GPU), frame rate, memory usage.
• Work with content creators to help improve their workflow.

Qualifications & Experience…

• 8+ years of experience in software development in the gaming industry, in the rendering team.
• Have participated in the shipping of at least 2 AAA game titles.
• Have significant experience in managing development teams.
• Bachelor's degree in computer science or computer engineering or another relevant field or equivalent work experience deemed adequate.
• Strong knowledge of various topics related to real-time rendering (lighting, shading, global illumination, post-processing, etc.).
• Knowledge of graphical application programming interfaces (DirectX 11 or 12, consoles) and graphical functions.
• Good interpersonal skills and demonstrated leadership abilities.
• Experience in coordination, mentoring and building a cohesive programming team.
• Experience in applying coding best practices.
• Experience programming large-scale console games at all stages of the life cycle, including prototyping, production, and shipping.
• Experience with memory management, multi-threading, and cross-platform development.
• Experience with Unreal Engine 4/5 is a plus.
• Excellent organizational and writing skills.
• Understanding of system optimization and excellent debugging skills
• Bilingualism English and French is a desired asset.
• Creativity, results-oriented orientation, self-motivation, resourcefulness, problem solving.
• Ability to collaborate with interdepartmental teams in programming and content creation.
• Self-starter attitude and comfort with collaboration
• Strong passion to build industry-leading game visuals and ship the highest quality AAA games.
• Published papers on rendering or effects techniques (ACM SIGGRAPH, GDC, IEEE) is a plus.