Staff Software Engineer

Staff Software Engineer

Austin, Texas, United States

Who We Are

At 2K, we create some of the most iconic and culture-shaping video games in entertainment, including NBA® 2K, one of the top-selling franchises in the world, and legendary titles like BioShock®, Borderlands®, Mafia, Sid Meier's Civilization®, and XCOM®, as well as fan favorites WWE® 2K, TopSpin®, and PGA TOUR® 2K. We build unforgettable experiences by pushing the boundaries of creativity, authenticity and innovation across every genre.

Our portfolio is brought to life by some of the most influential game development studios in the world. Visual Concepts, Firaxis Games, Hangar 13, Cat Daddy Games, 31st Union, Cloud Chamber, Gearbox, HB Studios, and 2K SportsLab create world-class experiences across platforms. But what truly powers 2K is our people. We believe the best ideas come from teams that feel empowered, supported, and inspired. As an equal opportunity employer, we are committed to fostering a diverse, inclusive workplace where people are encouraged to come as they are and do their best work.

About the Role

We're looking for a Staff Software Engineer to be the senior technical voice across our family of cross-platform, cross-language SDKs. Our SDKs ship in nearly every game 2K publishes, with first-class support across Unreal, Unity, native C++, Go, JavaScript, and more—and we need someone who can hold the architectural picture across all of them.

This is an individual contributor role. You will not have direct reports, but you will own technical decisions for the SDK portfolio and partner closely with engineering managers on direction, hiring, and team growth. We expect you to spend roughly half your time writing code and half your time setting technical direction—reviewing designs, raising the quality bar, and unblocking other engineers.

Your most important job on day one is driving architectural consistency across our language and engine variants. The Unreal, Unity, native C++, Go, and JavaScript SDKs should all feel like they came from the same team and uphold the same standards for API design, versioning, performance, and reliability.

This role is AI-first. You'll leverage large language models and AI-powered tooling as a core part of how you work—whether that's prototyping API designs, generating cross-language bindings, drafting RFCs, exploring refactors, or building tooling that scales the team's output. We expect you to push the boundaries of what's possible when AI is embedded into every aspect of senior engineering work.

What You Will Do

• Drive technical decisions across the SDK portfolio set by the Director and through collaboration with the team. Defend the architectural direction for how our SDKs are designed, layered, versioned, and evolved across Unreal, Unity, native C++, Go, JavaScript, and other targets.

• Ensure architectural consistency across language and engine variants so every studio gets a predictable, coherent developer experience regardless of which SDK they pick up.

• Stay hands-on. Write production code, prototype the hard problems first, lead the toughest implementations, and be a consistent presence in code review.

• A natural collaborator who leads through influence rather than authority—able to build trust across teams, bring people along on technical decisions, and elevate the engineers around you through empathy and clear communication.

• Define and uphold the bar for API design, documentation, backward compatibility, performance, and reliability—and make those standards legible to the rest of the team.

• Use LLMs and AI-powered workflows daily to accelerate your work: prototyping designs, generating boilerplate across languages, exploring refactors, drafting technical proposals, and automating repetitive engineering tasks.

• Build AI-assisted tooling that scales the SDK team's impact—whether that's code generation pipelines, automated review assistants, intelligent search over our SDK surface area, or anything else that compounds team output.

• Partner with engineering managers on technical strategy, hiring, and team growth without owning people management yourself.

• Work directly with studio engineering leads to understand how our SDKs are actually used in production and feeds those learnings back into the roadmap.

• Mentor engineers on the team—raise the technical ceiling without becoming a bottleneck.

• Represent the SDK team in cross-functional technical discussions across the Technology group and the studios.

What You Bring

• 8+ years of software engineering experience, with significant time spent designing and shipping SDKs, libraries, tools, or platform APIs that other engineers depend on.

• Fluency in C++ and at least one of C# (Unity), Go, or JavaScript / TypeScript—and the ability to ramp quickly on the others. You don't need to be an expert in every language we ship; you do need to be the person who can hold the architectural picture across all of them.

• Hands-on experience with Unreal and / or Unity, including how engines integrate with external native libraries.

• Strong instincts around API design, versioning, deprecation, and backward compatibility—you've felt the pain of getting these wrong and know how to avoid it.

• Hands-on experience working with LLM tools (Claude, ChatGPT, GitHub Copilot, Cursor, or similar) as part of your daily engineering workflow—not just experimentation, but real productivity gains and a point of view on where AI fits and where it doesn't.

• Comfortable being the technical decision-maker. You can hold a strong opinion, defend it with evidence, and change it when the evidence shifts.

• A clear, generous communicator. You write design docs people actually read, give code review feedback that lifts the team, and can explain trade-offs to non-engineers.

• Track record of working effectively across teams without formal authority.

Bonus Items

• Experience shipping developer tools or platforms in the games industry.

• Prior experience shipping software on console platforms (PlayStation, Xbox, Nintendo Switch), including familiarity with platform certification requirements and console-specific SDK constraints.

• Background in online services, networking, telemetry, or live operations.

• Experience with binding generators, FFI, or maintaining a native core with multiple language wrappers.

• Prior work building AI-powered developer tooling—code generation pipelines, review assistants, or intelligent retrieval over technical content.

• Exposure to RAG pipelines, embeddings, or agent frameworks applied to engineering workflows.

• Open-source contributions, especially to widely-used SDKs or developer libraries.

Why This Role Matters

Our SDKs are the connective tissue between the Technology group and every game team at 2K. The architectural decisions made on this team show up in dozens of titles, and the quality bar set here is the quality bar studios feel every day. This role puts a senior IC at the center of that—with the autonomy to set direction, the freedom to stay deep in the code, and the leverage to redefine what a modern, AI-first SDK team looks like at scale.

As an equal opportunity employer, we are committed to ensuring that qualified individuals with disabilities are provided reasonable accommodation to participate in the job application or interview process, to perform their essential job functions, and to receive other benefits and privileges of employment. Please contact us if you need reasonable accommodation.

Please note that 2K Games and its studios never uses instant messaging apps or personal email accounts to contact prospective employees or conduct interviews and when emailing, only use 2K.com accounts.

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