Technical Game Designer
About the role
2K’s Cat Daddy studio, based in Kirkland, Washington, was started 25+ years ago by industry veterans and is now a wholly owned subsidiary of Take-Two Interactive within the 2K Label. The studio is a fun, dedicated family of incredibly hardworking game developers. We have shipped games on almost every genre and platform, with a current focus on mobile games. Cat Daddy is seeking a Technical Designer to join our team of artists, engineers, and product managers to design, prototype, and ship features for free-to-play mobile games. This role sits between design and engineering. You will carry a feature from the first pitch through to the live build: writing the spec, standing up the prototype in Unity, wiring it into the services that run our games, and tuning it once players are inside it. The ideal candidate has shipped multiple F2P mobile games in a design or technical design role. This is an in-office position, located in Kirkland, WA. Must be able to work onsite 4 days a week.
Responsibilities
- Design new gameplay experiences including limited-time events, complete game modes, and mini-games that add variety and excitement to the core game loop.
- Own features end to end, from the pitch through a working prototype, the shipped build, and the live tuning pass that follows.
- Write specs that hold up as executable instructions: clear intent, explicit constraints, acceptance criteria, edge cases, and the failure states that separate a good build from a plausible one.
- Build, orchestrate, and refine agentic workflows across the design pipeline, covering research, competitive teardowns, spec drafting, prototype scaffolding, balance sweeps, content authoring, and telemetry analysis.
- Prototype directly in Unity so a concept can be played, and validated against live service systems.
- Collaborate with cross-functional teams to balance fun, difficulty, and monetization across your designs.
Qualifications
- 5+ years of game design experience, with a focus on free-to-play mobile games, plus a Bachelor's degree in a related field and/or comparable, relevant work experience.
- Deep, hands-on practice with agentic tooling and workflows, used daily rather than demoed occasionally.
- Fluency in the craft that makes those workflows work: context and prompt construction, task decomposition, tool and permission design, checkpointing, evaluation harnesses, and honest measurement of quality over time.
- Production experience in Unity building mobile games.
- Expert-level understanding of the mobile game market from a game design perspective, including game economies, data analysis, back-end environments, and live infrastructure.
- Practical understanding of game development pipelines end to end.
- World-class communication skills, with proven ability to produce effective design documentation, and a great teammate who can collaborate with engineers and artists on game development.
Pay
The pay range for this position in Kirkland, WA at the start of employment is expected to be between $88,700 and $131,300 per year. Base pay offered is based on market location, and may vary further depending on individualized factors for job candidates, such as job-related knowledge, skills, experience, and other objective business considerations. Total compensation may also include bonus and/or equity awards and eligibility to participate in the 401(K) plan and Employee Stock Purchase Program.
Benefits
- Medical, dental, vision, and basic life insurance coverage
- 14 paid holidays per calendar year
- Paid vacation time per calendar year (ranging from 15 to 25 days) or eligibility to participate in the Company’s discretionary time off program
- Up to 10 paid sick days per calendar year
- Paid parental and compassionate leave
- Wellbeing programs for mental health and other wellness support
- Family planning support through Maven
- Commuter benefits
- Reimbursements for fitness-related expenses
Schedule
This is an in-office position, located in Kirkland, WA. Must be able to work onsite 4 days a week.