Founding Unity Engineer (remote)

About us:

Octo Games is an international game development studio with a legal entity in the Netherlands. Since 2017, we've released more than 200 commercial games on Steam, building a loyal player community and gaining years of hands-on experience in game development.

We develop and publish our own games end-to-end — from the initial idea and narrative through production, release, live operations, and long-term support. Because we own our products, decisions are made quickly, good ideas are heard, and everyone has a real opportunity to influence the result.

Now we're starting a new chapter; we're building a portfolio of games — and we need a shared technical foundation that makes each one cheaper to build, faster to ship. We're looking for the person who will help us prove that.

About the role:

We're dedicating a focused initiative to explore a new direction. Our existing product line continues as it is, but this is separate: a fresh start with a small core team where you'll be the first technical hire. You'll own the technical foundation from day one, and as we grow, you'll help interview and bring in the next engineers.

We're not looking for the strongest architect, and we're not looking for another Unity developer to implement tickets. We're looking for a hands-on builder: someone who ships a playable build first and only turns a repeated pattern into a shared system once it's actually proven itself across more than one title. Builder first. Platform thinker second.

You'll work directly with the founders and the core team, with real input into both the games we make and how we make them. We'd rather solve the right problem simply than build the most elegant system for a problem we haven't confirmed yet.

For which tasks (responsibilities)?

What makes this role different:

• You own technical direction — nobody hands you a finished spec.

• You ship real, playable games while the technical foundation is still being figured out, not before.

• You work directly with the founders, with a real say in product decisions.

• As we grow, you'll help build the engineering team and its standards from scratch.

What you'll do

• Own technical implementation from concept through release.

• Design scalable gameplay architecture and core systems — after you've seen the pattern repeat, not before.

• Develop gameplay mechanics using Unity and C#.

• Ship production-ready playable builds yourself, hands-on keyboard.

• Build reusable frameworks, tooling, and workflows once a recurring need is confirmed, not speculatively.

• Set engineering standards and keep the codebase clean and scalable as the team grows.

• Integrate UI, animation, Addressables, plugins, 2D/3D assets, and video.

• Work closely with designers and artists to turn ideas into experiences players actually enjoy.

• Profile, optimize, and debug production builds.

What kind of professional are we looking for?

More importantly, the mindset:

• Builder before architect, always.

• A hands-on engineer who genuinely wants to keep writing production code.

• Comfortable moving without a perfect spec or a finished process.

• Knows when NOT to build the general solution — and can tell you about a time they deliberately didn't.

• Thinks in ownership, not tickets.

• Enjoys helping others grow as the team eventually scales around them.

What we're looking for

On the technical side:

• 5+ years of commercial Unity development.

• Strong C#, with real command of OOP, SOLID, and design patterns — not just familiarity with the terms.

• Experience designing scalable architecture from scratch, ideally more than once.

• Deep understanding of gameplay systems, not just the tools around them.

• ScriptableObjects and data-driven architecture.

• Unity Animator, Unity UI/Canvas.

• Addressables and asset management.

• Dependency Injection (Zenject, VContainer, or similar).

• Comfortable writing custom Unity Editor tooling.

• Solid with Git, profiling, and optimization.

• Shipped commercial games.

Nice to have:

• Multiplayer experience

• A game you personally shipped on Steam

• Telemetry and data-driven decision-making

• Build and release automation

• UniTask

• DOTween

• NavMesh / AI

• Shader Graph / HLSL

• Experience with AI-assisted development workflows

What is important for us in a person?

More importantly, the mindset:

• Builder before architect, always.

• A hands-on engineer who genuinely wants to keep writing production code.

• Comfortable moving without a perfect spec or a finished process.

• Knows when NOT to build the general solution — and can tell you about a time they deliberately didn't.

• Thinks in ownership, not tickets.

• Enjoys helping others grow as the team eventually scales around them.

Why do we enjoy working here?

What we offer:

• Fully remote work.

• Base salary scaled to experience and location.

• 20 paid days off—15 vacation, 5 sick

• Direct access to founders — no layers in between.

• Real ownership and real influence over what gets built.

• Minimal bureaucracy, fast decisions.

• The chance to build both the products and the engineering culture around them.