Chief Technology Officer, Gaming Studio in Bellevue, WA

We are actively looking for a hands-on CTO for a client in Seattle, WA. We are looking for someone with Unity or Unreal Engine Experience and loves getting involved with developing new games, strategic about hiring, and passionate about diversity.

The CTO role offers a balance of significant operational responsibility and strategic opportunity to help drive better use of technology across the studio. The CTO will have the bearing and gravitas to lead the entire technical team at a time of great opportunity in the sector.

There is a gap in their technical leadership right now (their CEO is acting as interim CTO) which needs to address as they ramp up staffing for their new game. We are looking for a technical leader that is passionate about recruiting and developing the right engineers passionate about shipping beautiful and reliable games. They are a small (but growing!) studio. From a tech perspective, they tend to make things easy for themselves through collaboration in their design and art. There are always trade offs when making technical decisions.

Number of Direct Reports: 3 initially, expected to grow to 5-7 over the next year

Expectations for this role:

• Comfortable and capable of making decisions across all game engineering disciplines for gameplay, rendering, console support, and beyond.
• Ideally, this role with be 60-70% hands-on.
• Experience with modern gaming technologies like UE4 shipping experience.
• Experience with modern gaming consoles.
• Familiarity with common backend stacks for online games and cloud technologies (AWS/Azure/GCP).

Minimum Qualifications:

• A minimum of 10 years management experience in a commercial organisation with substantial experience in a CTO/Senior management role.
• Significant senior management experience within the online gaming industry and/or high velocity online transactional environment.
• The CTO will be the Company’s spokesperson in all technology-related matter and as such the candidate will be extremely confident in articulating their technology knowledge when dealing with all parties outside the Company.
• Establishing a process to identify and develop talent. We need a recruiting-first executive that understands talent and drives our production and value to our games.
• Skills in business analysis, business process design, project management, and e-commerce strategy.
• Have a successful track record of establishing and managing multi-location development operations.

We would love the following;

• Hands on experience with Unreal Engine or Unity
• Experience developing in C# or C++
• Passionate about design even though you practice top tier engineering fundamentals

Employee Benefits;

• Salary + Equity in the company
• Unlimited PTO
• Healthcare Benefits, etc.