About the role
Blackbird Interactive is a creative-fueled, future-driven, independent game studio where the best talent in the industry can find long-term careers to help grow their abilities while working on a wide range of projects. That includes world-class IPs as well as our own creations across multiple genres.
We are seeking a passionate Platform Engineer to help across various, technically ambitious projects. You will work across platform-facing systems on modern consoles, including PS5, Xbox Series X|S, and Switch 2. You will implement new features, fix bugs, profile and optimize existing code. This role is remote-friendly in Canada (Pacific-time overlap required).
What You’ll Tackle
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Own and evolve platform systems in proprietary engines across PC and consoles, with an emphasis on performance and reliability.
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Implement and optimize memory systems (allocators, pools, paging/streaming heaps, fragmentation mitigation, lifetime tracking, OOM safety).
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Build and tune I/O and streaming foundations (async file I/O, decompression pipelines, asset streaming, prioritization, bandwidth/latency hiding, patch-friendly layouts).
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Improve CPU performance and scalability (job systems, thread scheduling, contention reduction, cache/memory locality, frame-time stability, hitch reduction).
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Integrate and maintain platform SDK-facing code and abstraction layers, ensuring clean boundaries between platform-specific and cross-platform systems.
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Profile and optimize using platform and internal tooling (CPU sampling, memory trackers, I/O traces, performance capture tools) to identify bottlenecks and regressions.
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Partner with gameplay, rendering, audio, and content teams to define budgets, best practices, and guardrails that keep builds performant and stable.
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Contribute to tooling and workflows that improve developer velocity (profiling hooks, telemetry, regression tests, automated reporting, validation checks).
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Communicate clearly to production and stakeholders on constraints, trade-offs, risk, and roadmap for performance and platform readiness.
You’ll Thrive Here If You
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Enjoy learning about bleeding edge technologies and implementing them from scratch.
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Get excited to work on things that you’ve never worked on before.
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Embrace being a generalist that can jump into various areas of a game engine, like platform APIs, streaming, rendering, audio, etc.
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Have strong modern C++ and systems-level debugging skills (multithreading, performance profiling, low-level investigation).
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Have solid understanding of console constraints and performance fundamentals: CPU architecture, memory hierarchy, cache behavior, and storage/I/O characteristics.
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Ability to take ownership, deliver maintainable solutions, and contribute constructively to team standards.
Bonus XP
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Any side projects you can share.
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Shipped at least one title on PS5, Xbox Series X|S, and/or Nintendo hardware, especially with platform/performance responsibility.
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Familiarity with platform profiling workflows (e.g., PIX and equivalent console tooling) and building internal performance diagnostics.
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Experience creating performance regression detection (benchmarks, automated captures, dashboards) and production-friendly guardrails.
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Experience with Unreal Engine.