Technical Director

At ZeptoLab, we're looking for a Technical Director to own the continued technical evolution of Bullet Echo and help transform its engineering system.

This is a senior technical leadership role focused on shaping architecture, improving engineering effectiveness, and driving AI-first development across a live product.

What you'll do

• Define the technical vision for Bullet Echo and set the direction for client, battle server, and backend architecture.
• Evolve the architecture and engineering practices of an established live product with a large and complex codebase.
• Own the technical roadmap, engineering quality, technical debt, and key technical risks.
• Evaluate product initiatives in terms of feasibility, cost, risks, time-to-market, and architectural impact.
• Manage technical priorities and engineering capacity across product development, LiveOps, and technology development.
• Improve engineering processes with a focus on reducing the end-to-end development cycle from task definition to production.
• Drive the adoption of AI-first engineering approaches across development and testing.
• Assess the technical team, identify development opportunities, and help build a strong and effective engineering organization.

What we're looking for

• 1.5+ years of experience as a Technical Director, CTO, Technical Lead, Lead Engineer, or in a comparable role with significant ownership in live game development.
• Strong C++ background and experience working with a large production codebase in a live product.
• People management experience, with the ability to lead, develop, and evaluate a technical team.
• Strong understanding of real-time multiplayer architecture, including client/server interaction, synchronization, networking, and battle servers.
• Strong understanding of high-load backend architecture and distributed systems.
• Experience improving engineering practices within an established team and legacy environment, with measurable results.
• Experience with LiveOps and production engineering, including releases, CI/CD, testing, monitoring, hotfixes, and incident management.
• Experience defining technical strategy and managing technical debt, architectural risks, and engineering capacity.
• Strong practical experience with AI-assisted or agentic software development and introducing AI into team-wide engineering workflows.
• Strong ownership and ability to independently define technical direction and drive change.
• Experience with custom game engines would be a strong plus.
• Fluency in both English and Russian would be considered an advantage.

Why this role is interesting

• The opportunity to set the technical direction of Bullet Echo and have a real impact on how the product evolves.
• A high level of autonomy and ownership — we expect you to bring your own vision, identify what needs to change, and drive it forward.
• The opportunity to rebuild software development and testing around AI agents, with humans setting goals and overseeing the work at key points.
• Strong support from the company to drive meaningful changes and experiment with new approaches.