Production Lead

Production Lead

Second Unit Games | Remote - U.S.

Second Unit is looking for an experienced Production Lead for client game projects.

This is a hands-on role. You'll lead production, but you'll also do the day-to-day production work. We're looking for someone who is comfortable building and maintaining schedules, running meetings, managing backlogs, tracking dependencies, identifying risks, working directly with developers, and making sure the team has what it needs to deliver.

If you're a senior producer who enjoys leading people and projects but doesn't want your job to become managing the people who manage the work, this may be a good fit.

What You'll Do

You'll be responsible for production on a Second Unit client project, working with our discipline leads, the client's production team, and the developers doing the work.

Our project teams will typically be small, cross-disciplinary groups of approximately 6-15 developers, depending on the scope of the engagement. As Production Lead, you'll work across the entire team, partnering directly with each discipline lead and serving as one of Second Unit's primary day-to-day contacts with the client.

You'll own the project plan and the day-to-day process of getting the work delivered. That includes building schedules, managing scope, maintaining the backlog, tracking progress and dependencies, running team meetings, identifying risks early, and making sure problems get in front of the right people before they become bigger problems.

You'll establish a regular communication cadence with the client, keep them informed about progress and upcoming milestones, surface risks and changes early, and make sure expectations are clear on both sides. When there's a difficult production conversation to have, you'll be expected to have it.

The actual work will vary by project. You might be planning a DLC milestone, working with the Engineering Lead to understand why a feature is slipping, helping Art work through a dependency, preparing for a client review, adjusting the plan after a scope change, or making sure the client understands how a change they've requested affects the schedule.

You'll work closely with the project's discipline leads, but you won't simply collect status from them. We expect you to understand the work well enough to ask good questions, challenge assumptions when necessary, and turn what's happening inside the team into clear, useful communication for the client.

You may also lead and mentor other producers assigned to the project. We expect our leads to set the standard for how the team plans, communicates, raises problems, and follows through on commitments.

You'll Help Us Win the Work, Too

Our leads are involved before a project starts, not just after the work has been signed.

You'll participate in client discovery and planning meetings to understand the game, the roadmap, the client's development process, and what they need from us. You'll help define scope, identify production risks and dependencies, build initial schedules and staffing plans, and determine how a Second Unit team can fit into the client's existing production structure.

You will be an integral part of our initial client conversations. We believe our clients should meet the people who will actually be responsible for the work. You should be comfortable talking with producers, discipline leads, and studio leadership, asking detailed questions about their roadmap and production challenges, and explaining how we would organize and manage the work.

A big part of this role is giving a prospective client confidence that if they hand Second Unit a meaningful piece of their roadmap, we'll take responsibility for getting it delivered.

What We're Looking For

There are two experience requirements for this position that are important to us: you've helped ship a major game, and you've managed development on a game after it shipped.

You must have:

• Personally contributed to the development and launch of at least one AA or AAA game in a production role
• Experience managing development on a released game and delivering live or post-launch content
• Strong hands-on game production experience, including scheduling, backlog management, milestone planning, dependency tracking, and risk management
• Experience working directly with multidisciplinary development teams
• Experience leading and mentoring other producers
• Experience serving as a primary production contact for an external partner, publisher, client, or senior internal stakeholder
• Experience managing changing priorities and scope without losing sight of the larger project goals
• The ability to turn incomplete or changing information into a plan the team can actually execute
• A solid understanding of game-development pipelines and how art, design, engineering, QA, and other disciplines depend on one another
• Experience with common game-development production tools and workflows
• The ability to communicate project status, milestones, risks, scope changes, tradeoffs, and difficult news clearly and professionally
• The judgment and communication skills to work directly with client producers, discipline leads, and studio leadership

You do not need to have "Lead" in your title. If you're a senior producer who has been taking responsibility for teams, milestones, or significant pieces of a game and other people already look to you to keep the work moving, we're interested in talking to you.

Professional experience with Jira, Confluence, Hansoft, ShotGrid, Perforce, Unreal Engine, Unity, or proprietary development tools is useful. We're less concerned with which particular production system you've used than whether you understand how games actually get planned, built, tested, shipped, and supported after launch.

What We Want to See From You

When you apply, we'd like to see more than a list of studios, projects, and job titles. Help us understand what you were actually responsible for.

In the application process we'll include a place for you to tell us which games you've shipped, what part of the project you managed, the size and makeup of the teams you worked with, and what you personally owned. If you've supported a game after launch, tell us about the DLC, live content, updates, or other post-launch work you helped deliver.

We'd also like to hear about a project that didn't go according to plan. Tell us what happened, what you did about it, and how it turned out. Production is often most valuable when things aren't going well, and we want to understand how you operate when schedules, scope, dependencies, or priorities change.

We care much more about what you were responsible for and what you delivered than what your title was.

What This Role Isn't

This isn't a Production Director job where your primary responsibility is managing producers and reviewing reports.

It also isn't a project coordinator position. We expect you to do the detailed production work, but we also expect you to understand the larger project, make judgments, challenge assumptions, identify problems, and take responsibility for delivery.

You won't own the technical or creative decisions that belong to our discipline leads. You will own making sure those decisions happen when they need to, dependencies are understood, commitments are clear, and the project keeps moving.

Your job is to make sure the project gets delivered well. You'll lead the production work, and you'll do the production work.

How We Work

Second Unit is a remote-first U.S. studio.

Our primary employment model is W-2 hourly.

You'll be paid for every hour you work, including approved overtime when applicable. Because our work depends on client projects, there may be periods between assignments when hours are not available. We want to be clear about that from the beginning.

While assigned to client work, eligible employees receive monthly healthcare and hardware stipends.

You'll use your own workstation, provided it meets Second Unit's hardware and security requirements. We provide the dedicated project environment and security configuration used for company work. Individual clients may require additional security measures or virtual development environments.

The Person We're Looking For

You like making complicated projects understandable.

You want to know what's actually happening, not just what the schedule says is happening. You ask questions. You raise problems early. You don't hide bad news, and you don't let a meeting end with everyone having a different understanding of what was decided.

You're comfortable being the person the client calls when they want to know where things stand. You build trust by communicating regularly, knowing the details, and not surprising people. When there's bad news, you bring it with enough context and enough time to do something about it.

You know that good production isn't about filling calendars with meetings or making developers update Jira. It's about helping talented people work together, making sure decisions get made, identifying problems while there is still time to solve them, and keeping everyone focused on what we're trying to deliver.

When a project gets difficult, you get more involved, not less. And after years in game development, you still enjoy the moment when a team gets something across the finish line and into the hands of players.

If that sounds familiar, we'd like to hear what you've shipped, what you were responsible for, and what you worked on after launch.

About Second Unit

Keep your next game moving. Keep your current game thriving.

Second Unit works with established game studios that need to keep supporting successful games while their internal teams move on to what's next.

Our U.S.-based teams work directly inside our clients' development pipelines and take responsibility for defined pieces of their roadmap, including DLC, live content, gameplay features, systems, and other player-facing work.

Our teams are led by experienced developers who are still actively involved in making the game.