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
Own and evolve platform systems in proprietary engines across PC and consoles, with an emphasis on performance and reliability.
Implement and optimize memory systems (allocators, pools, paging/streaming heaps, fragmentation mitigation, lifetime tracking, OOM safety).
Build and tune I/O and streaming foundations (async file I/O, decompression pipelines, asset streaming, prioritization, bandwidth/latency hiding, patch-friendly layouts).
Improve CPU performance and scalability (job systems, thread scheduling, contention reduction, cache/memory locality, frame-time stability, hitch reduction).
Integrate and maintain platform SDK-facing code and abstraction layers, ensuring clean boundaries between platform-specific and cross-platform systems.
Profile and optimize using platform and internal tooling (CPU sampling, memory trackers, I/O traces, performance capture tools) to identify bottlenecks and regressions.
Partner with gameplay, rendering, audio, and content teams to define budgets, best practices, and guardrails that keep builds performant and stable.
Contribute to tooling and workflows that improve developer velocity (profiling hooks, telemetry, regression tests, automated reporting, validation checks).
Communicate clearly to production and stakeholders on constraints, trade-offs, risk, and roadmap for performance and platform readiness.
You’ll Thrive Here If You
Enjoy learning about bleeding edge technologies and implementing them from scratch.
Get excited to work on things that you’ve never worked on before.
Embrace being a generalist that can jump into various areas of a game engine, like platform APIs, streaming, rendering, audio, etc.
Have strong modern C++ and systems-level debugging skills (multithreading, performance profiling, low-level investigation).
Have solid understanding of console constraints and performance fundamentals: CPU architecture, memory hierarchy, cache behavior, and storage/I/O characteristics.
Ability to take ownership, deliver maintainable solutions, and contribute constructively to team standards.
Bonus XP
Any side projects you can share.
Shipped at least one title on PS5, Xbox Series X|S, and/or Nintendo hardware, especially with platform/performance responsibility.
Familiarity with platform profiling workflows (e.g., PIX and equivalent console tooling) and building internal performance diagnostics.
Experience creating performance regression detection (benchmarks, automated captures, dashboards) and production-friendly guardrails.
Experience with Unreal Engine.
