Lead Level Designer

About Eleventh Hour Games: Eleventh Hour Games is a premier, internationally recognized game development pioneer, action RPG (ARPG) innovator, and global interactive entertainment leader on an absolute mission to gather and empower the next generation of creators to forge extraordinary games. Widely celebrated throughout the global gaming industry for their massive breakout title, Last Epoch, the studio focuses on cultivating deeply passionate player communities by translating developer creativity into highly immersive, loop-driven digital realities. Now integrated within the broader KRAFTON Americas publishing infrastructure (alongside sister studios like Striking Distance Studios and Unknown Worlds), Eleventh Hour Games operates on a high-ownership, fully remote operational model rooted in open communication and tight-knit collaboration. The organization provides veteran level designers and technical artists with an uncompromised virtual canvas to master live-service gaming architectures and scale memorable environmental experiences safely across worldwide gaming networks.

Position Overview

We are seeking a highly analytical, systems-minded Lead Level Designer to join our core centralized Design division in a full-time remote capacity globally. In this high-leverage creative leadership seat, you will step up to claim individual strategic operational accountability for managing, defining, and optimizing the comprehensive environments, spatial layouts, enemy combat encounters, and exploratory player experiences that bring Last Epoch and future adventure expansions to life. Shifting completely away from mechanical map decoration or isolated asset positioning, you will drive the creative vision and technical execution of levels, ensuring they support core gameplay pacing, seamless narrative integration, and striking visual storytelling. This position requires an industry veteran with 5+ years of professional level design background—encompassing at least 2+ years of lead or senior experience—who models world spaces fluidly, scripts encounter nodes smoothly within modern game engines, and refines design workflows to maximize distributed team velocity under strict publishing deadlines.

Key Responsibilities

• Level Design Team Leadership and Mentorship: Direct, mentor, and expand a world-class team of level designers, running regular design critiques and fostering professional development to raise the overall quality bar across a remote-first studio layout natively utilizing Game Dev mechanics.
• Creative Environmental Vision Ownership: Define, document, and champion the technical execution guidelines of game zones, verifying uncompromised alignment with core systems, narrative goals, and artistic style parameters.
• Cross-Disciplinary Pipeline Optimization: Collaborate peer-to-peer alongside environment artists, narrative designers, and system engineers to deliver highly cohesive, immersive zones natively leveraging Engineering & Architecture guidelines inside the engine editor.
• Hands-On Blockout and Prototyping Curation: Contribute directly to high-stakes level creation, building primary level blockouts, graybox prototypes, spatial flow diagrams, and interactive encounter mechanics from scratch.
• Encounter Balance and Worldbuilding Auditing: Review and supply precise, actionable feedback on structural level layouts, mob encounter pacing, risk-reward ratios, and environmental storytelling consistency.
• Performance, Quality, and Accessibility Triage: Enforce and evaluate rigorous frame-rate optimization boundaries, checking that all level geometry, occlusion boundaries, and streaming nodes satisfy strict mobile and desktop hardware performance standards.
• Agile Milestone and Deliverable Tracking: Partner closely with internal production cells to scope, schedule, and track level design deliverables, managing dependencies and removing blockers across distributed sprint matrices.
• Sovereign Recruitment and Studio Security Adherence: Support core talent acquisition review blocks while strictly adhering to corporate safety guidelines, verifying and engaging with applicants exclusively via authorized corporate email channels.

Required Skills & Qualifications

• 5+ years of verified professional history running commercial game level design, real-time environment arrangement, encounter scripting engineering, asset pipeline management, or interactive systems consulting.
• Deep, authoritative technical command of player psychology, pacing curves, level blockout mechanics, line-of-sight metrics, spatial topology, and multiplayer level flow parameters.
• Expert-tier technical proficiency building levels, scripting triggers, and orchestrating gameplay nodes natively utilizing Game Dev engines (specifically covering Unity or Unreal environments).
• Practical operational familiarity structuring multi-tier design documents, zoning maps, and architectural workflows natively using Engineering & Architecture software methodologies.
• Documented Studio Launch Footprint: A proven, trackable history of successfully shipping at least one commercial video game title operating explicitly within a senior, principal, or lead design capacity.
• Outstanding verbal and written communication traits in fluent English, enabling uncompromised asynchronous collaboration, design documentation upkeep, and team alignment across multiple international time zones.
• Location Context: Position open to qualified game design leads globally to execute technical and managerial duties under a 100% remote work-from-home arrangement.

Preferred Strategic Indicators (Nice to Have)

• Prior commercial level architecture or management history operating within a fast-scaling live-service game platform, high-revenue top-down action RPG (ARPG) studio, or persistent online multiplayer network.
• Deep personal literacy or mechanical gameplay understanding of isometric loot loops, randomized dungeon generators, procedural tile maps, or complex multi-tiered boss battle maps.
• Introductory exposure to visual scripting layers, custom level building tool plugins, or low-level performance profiling modules within the engine editor.
• An outcome-driven personal philosophy rooted in immense passion for the gaming medium, an eagerness to challenge legacy step-by-step processes, and a desire to build next year’s game creators.

What We Offer

• The exceptional professional canvas to directly direct, shape, and code-engineer the foundational level topologies, combat encounters, and environmental systems power-routing expansion tracks for a massive breakout ARPG title.
• Highly competitive, experience-calibrated full-time baseline compensation packages calibrated precisely to reward your game architecture authority, tool craftsmanship, and creative team leadership velocity.
• Profound work-from-home remote parameters providing an elite virtual workplace environment, complete scheduling trust, and zero physical geographic office commuting friction from any location worldwide.
• Direct operational exposure to a fast-growing, highly visible game studio backed by the vast infrastructure, resources, and publishing support networks of KRAFTON Americas.
• Continuous skill acceleration pathways across next-generation live-service content pipelines, advanced real-time performance optimization techniques, and multi-team cross-disciplinary collaboration models.
• Access to robust reasonable accommodation interactive channels under comprehensive global equal employment opportunity initiatives to ensure your physical and digital workplace can thrive.