Lead Sound Designer

Lead Sound Designer

Frisco, Texas, United States; Montréal, Quebec, Canada

The Gearbox Entertainment Company is home to a world-class team that entertains the world with award-winning and genre-defining video games. Our games are entrenched with rich universes that are expanded upon via transmedia storytelling, live experiences, and consumer products. Gearbox Entertainment has become widely known for developing successful game franchises such as Borderlands, Tiny Tina's Wonderlands, and Brothers in Arms, as well for continued development of acquired properties including Duke Nukem, Risk of Rain, and Homeworld.

The company was founded as Gearbox Software in 1999 by a team of industry veterans and is headquartered in Frisco, Texas. The Gearbox Entertainment Company is proud to be part of 2K, a publishing label of Take-Two Interactive Software, Inc. For more information, visit

What We Are Looking For

We are looking for a Lead Sound Designer to help guide the creative, technical, and organizational execution of sound design across one or more projects. This role reports to the Director of Sound Design and partners directly with Audio Leadership, Technical Sound Design, production, and cross-discipline teams to help define, execute, and maintain the project's sonic direction. The Lead Sound Designer acts as the primary sound design point of contact for the project, ensuring audio goals, scope, priorities, quality standards, and needs are communicated and delivered. The ideal candidate is both a strong sound designer and a project level leader. This individual can create excellent content, guide and mentor other sound designers, and translate creative audio goals into shippable results.

Project Responsibilities

• Serve as the primary sound design point of contact for an assigned project.
• Partner with Audio Leadership to define, refine, and execute the project's sound design goals.
• Drive day-to-day project sound design execution while maintaining alignment with broader audio direction.
• Maintain a cohesive sonic identity across features and systems, ensuring sound design pillars, tone, and standards are upheld.
• Translate high-level audio direction into clear feature plans, creating sonic style guide documentation and identifying and driving sound design palette building sessions.
• Work with production to identify and communicate audio scope, risks, dependencies, and priorities.
• Help identify workflow and pipeline challenges and partner with appropriate teams to resolve them.
• Coordinate with outsourcing partners and provide feedback, reviews, shotlists, style guides, and quality control.

Team Responsibilities

• Lead, mentor, and support sound designers across assigned projects, features, or content areas.
• Review sound design work and provide clear, constructive feedback that raises quality while supporting team growth.
• Help maintain team morale, trust, and creative momentum through strong communication and thoughtful leadership.
• Support onboarding, knowledge sharing, and alignment around project audio standards.

Creative Responsibilities

• Design, edit, process, and mix high quality sound effects.
• Collaborate with audio leadership on project sound design pillars, tone, mix direction, standards, and technical goals.
• Take on high level of complexity in sound design work. Will be expected to handle the most forefront game feature sets of audio design such as weapons, character audio, and more with complete autonomy.
• Create and maintain sound design documentation, including style guides, onesheets, shotlists, and palette references.
• Lead and contribute to sound jam palette building sessions and creative exploration sessions.
• Implement content into Wwise and UE5.
• Record original source and lead or support recording sessions, defining the projects source recording needs.
• Partner with Technical Sound Design on system behavior and implementation workflows.
• Locate, diagnose, and troubleshoot issues and audio bugs.

Qualifications

• Previous experience in leading sound design efforts.
• 7+ years of professional game audio experience with at least one shipped title.
• Adept ability at sound design, mixing, editing, and audio design techniques.
• Strong soft skills and the ability to partner with audio leadership and cross-discipline teams.
• Excellent understanding of the end-to-end game development pipeline.
• Must be receptive to sound design feedback from peers and departmental leadership.
• Awareness of game industry trends, tools, techniques, and player expectations.
• Well versed at how to create clear and thorough documentation such as style guides or system designs.
• Ability to communicate creative goals, risks, and priorities across disciplines.

Bonus Experience

• Audio training and/or degree in audio production.
• Experience with scripting or programming languages.
• Post production mix experience.

Gearbox Entertainment is committed to ensuring that all team members work in an environment free from discrimination and harassment, and one that reflects the diversity of the world it strives to entertain. As an equal opportunity employer, Gearbox Entertainment does not discriminate against applicants or employees on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, pregnancy, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, national origin, age, disability, or genetic information, or any other status protected by applicable law.

Gearbox Entertainment is also committed to providing reasonable accommodations to qualified individuals to participate in the job application process, to perform the essential functions of a job, and to enjoy the benefits and privileges of employment equal to those enjoyed by individuals without disabilities. If you need a reasonable accommodation at any point during the job application process, please contact us for more information.

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.