Remote Mid-level / Senior Platform Engineer (Porting / Co-dev)

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

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  Own and evolve platform systems in proprietary engines across PC and consoles, with an emphasis on performance and reliability.



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  Implement and optimize memory systems (allocators, pools, paging/streaming heaps, fragmentation mitigation, lifetime tracking, OOM safety).



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  Build and tune I/O and streaming foundations (async file I/O, decompression pipelines, asset streaming, prioritization, bandwidth/latency hiding, patch-friendly layouts).



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  Improve CPU performance and scalability (job systems, thread scheduling, contention reduction, cache/memory locality, frame-time stability, hitch reduction).



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  Integrate and maintain platform SDK-facing code and abstraction layers, ensuring clean boundaries between platform-specific and cross-platform systems.



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  Profile and optimize using platform and internal tooling (CPU sampling, memory trackers, I/O traces, performance capture tools) to identify bottlenecks and regressions.



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  Partner with gameplay, rendering, audio, and content teams to define budgets, best practices, and guardrails that keep builds performant and stable.



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  Contribute to tooling and workflows that improve developer velocity (profiling hooks, telemetry, regression tests, automated reporting, validation checks).



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  Communicate clearly to production and stakeholders on constraints, trade-offs, risk, and roadmap for performance and platform readiness.

You’ll Thrive Here If You

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  Enjoy learning about bleeding edge technologies and implementing them from scratch.



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  Get excited to work on things that you’ve never worked on before.



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  Embrace being a generalist that can jump into various areas of a game engine, like platform APIs, streaming, rendering, audio, etc.



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  Have strong modern C++ and systems-level debugging skills (multithreading, performance profiling, low-level investigation).



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  Have solid understanding of console constraints and performance fundamentals: CPU architecture, memory hierarchy, cache behavior, and storage/I/O characteristics.



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  Ability to take ownership, deliver maintainable solutions, and contribute constructively to team standards.

Bonus XP

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  Any side projects you can share.



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  Shipped at least one title on PS5, Xbox Series X|S, and/or Nintendo hardware, especially with platform/performance responsibility.



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  Familiarity with platform profiling workflows (e.g., PIX and equivalent console tooling) and building internal performance diagnostics.



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  Experience creating performance regression detection (benchmarks, automated captures, dashboards) and production-friendly guardrails.



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  Experience with Unreal Engine.

$126,000 - $160,000 a year