Senior Level Designer

Location: Remote — North America
Level: Senior / Experienced
Contract: Full Time

AstroNomad Studios is a new, small, distributed game studio backed by AIC. We are building original, expressive games with strong mechanical identity, memorable worlds, and a focus on player discovery, mastery, and adventure.

We are looking for a Senior Level Designer to design, block out, test, and refine level spaces for our current third-person action/adventure project, with a particular focus on traversal, exploration, encounter flow, 360 degree spatial readability, and player discovery.

This is a hands-on senior design role for someone who can turn abstract creative and gameplay goals into clear, playable spaces; iterate quickly in-engine; communicate design intent clearly; and help a small team build levels that are readable, memorable, and achievable.

WHAT YOU’LL DO

• Design, block out, and iterate level spaces that support traversal, exploration, combat, discovery, pacing, and player mastery.
• Create playable greyboxes/blockouts that make player pathing, landmarks, routes, risks, rewards, and encounter intent clear.
• Work closely with creative direction, systems design, combat, art, animation, engineering, and production to ensure levels are fun, readable, buildable, and aligned with the project’s goals.
• Translate high-level world and gameplay direction into practical layouts, traversal beats, encounter setups, discovery moments, and implementation-ready notes.
• Design spaces that guide the player through composition, silhouette, landmarks, affordances, framing, pacing, and environmental logic rather than relying only on explicit markers.
• Prototype and refine traversal-heavy spaces based on feel, camera behavior, readability, failure recovery, pacing, and playtest feedback.
• Identify level design risks early, including unclear routes, overcomplicated layouts, weak recovery points, poor landmarking, poor encounter pacing, or spaces that exceed scope.
• Collaborate with artists and technical team members to move levels from greybox toward shippable content while preserving design intent.
• Support the creation of a game that rewards curiosity, movement, exploration, experimentation, danger, and player discovery.

WHAT WE’RE LOOKING FOR

• Demonstrated experience designing 3D levels for action, action-adventure, traversal-heavy, exploration-focused, platforming, combat, or similarly spatially demanding games.
• Strong spatial design instincts: you understand player flow, readability, landmarks, route choice, pacing, sightlines, scale, encounter setup, and environmental affordances.
• Hands-on ability to build and iterate playable blockouts/greyboxes in a modern game engine or comparable 3D tool.
• Ability to turn creative goals and gameplay mechanics into practical spaces that can be tested, improved, and built by a small team.
• Understanding of third-person gameplay considerations, including camera, movement feel, collision, failure recovery, checkpoints, player guidance, and spatial clarity.
• Experience using playtest feedback to diagnose and improve level layouts.
• Clear written and verbal communication, including the ability to explain level intent through diagrams, notes, walkthroughs, blockouts, and practical documentation.
• Comfort working in a small team where roles may overlap, priorities may evolve, and ownership matters.
• Good taste in level design — not just adding more paths, objects, or setpieces, but knowing what should be simplified, clarified, emphasized, or removed.
• A practical mindset: you care about what can actually be built, tested, polished, and improved.

PREFERRED EXPERIENCE

• Shipped-title experience or equivalent production experience taking levels from concept/blockout through iteration, implementation, polish, and release.
• Strong Unreal Engine experience, especially building, testing, scripting, or iterating level spaces in-engine.
• Background in third-person action-adventure, traversal-heavy games, combat spaces, platforming, exploration-focused design, or stylized adventure games.
• Experience designing vertical spaces, traversal routes, optional paths, secrets, shortcuts, risk/reward routes, or environmental challenges.
• Experience collaborating with environment art, animation, combat design, systems design, engineering, and production.
• Experience with encounter layout, enemy placement, pacing, checkpoints, failure recovery, and player onboarding.
• Comfort working remotely with a distributed team.
• Interest in stylized, expressive, mythic, strange, adventurous, or highly atmospheric worlds.

ABOUT ASTRONOMAD STUDIOS

AstroNomad Studios is the game-development arm of AIC. We are a new studio building a small, focused, distributed team around original games with strong mechanical identity and expressive worlds.

We are drawn to games that combine movement, danger, discovery, mastery, atmosphere, and adventure — games where level spaces are not just containers for gameplay, but part of how the player understands and inhabits the world.

We are early, ambitious, and practical. That means we care about distinctive creative direction, but also about scope, clarity, ownership, and making decisions a small team can actually execute.

If you like building spaces that support movement, exploration, danger, readability, atmosphere, and meaningful player choice — not just isolated challenges or decorative environments — this may be a strong fit.

HOW TO APPLY

Please include as much of the following as you can:

• Your resume and/or portfolio.
• Examples of levels, blockouts, greyboxes, shipped spaces, prototypes, or playable layouts you directly contributed to.
• If available, before/after examples showing how a level changed through playtesting, iteration, or team feedback.
• Any relevant engine, scripting, documentation, diagramming, or collaboration examples.
• A short note about one level, area, traversal space, or exploration-focused game environment you admire and why it works.

We value proven design instincts, clear communication, practical execution, and the autonomy to help drive level design in a small team. We do not need every candidate to match every bullet exactly, but we are especially interested in designers with senior-level spatial design judgment, hands-on blockout experience, strong traversal/exploration instincts, and the ability to collaborate across disciplines.